


Seven-Two-Eight.

by klubin (sidonay)



Series: Ark [1]
Category: Houdini & Doyle (TV)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 05:12:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7300855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/klubin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Houdini wakes up in the halls of the <i>Ark Royal</i>—a lavish hotel floating amongst the stars—seemingly the only survivor of a horrible attack but with no memory of how it happened. He soon discovers, though, that he’s not alone and finds Arthur Conan Doyle and Adelaide Stratton, both of them stuck in the same boat, their memories of the past few hours gone.</p><p>The <i>Royal</i> is functionally dead; a hollow skeleton of what it once was, drifting through the dark. The three of them are trapped inside, no way to call for help, alone on an empty ship with far more questions than answers. </p><p>But, as time passes, things only get more bizarre and they all start to realize that they might not be quite as alone as they had once thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 7-2-8

**Author's Note:**

> Last summer I wrote a lengthy, kind of weird sci-fi AU for a small fandom. This summer… I’ve done the exact same thing, the only difference this time is that this AU is weirder. Apparently this is just what I do now.
> 
> I have no good explanation for this other than that I like this show a whole heck of a lot and I also like science fiction a whole heck of a lot so I decided to combine them and see what happened.
> 
> And, well… this. This is what happened.

In the very back of his head, as if buried like a small animal against the solid curvature of his skull, Harry Houdini hears somebody screaming. It’s a shrill, desperate sort of noise, different from the kinds of appalled and startled feminine shrieks that were directed at him when he performed a particularly dangerous stunt in front of a crowd. Different from the swirling, curious yelps. This one sounds almost too real, too raw, and it scratches at the thin air around around him, begging him to open his eyes (Open them? How long have they been closed?) but he doesn’t move, doesn’t respond to it right away. He hopes, perhaps, that it’ll stop on it’s own accord, that maybe somebody else would handle it but it doesn’t, it keeps going, louder like the person was stumbling, crawling towards him.

His eyes snap open and, at first, he sees nothing, panic creeping up his bones as his brain whispers the word _blind_ but then, as he stares up at the ceiling, he realizes it’s simply because all the lights were out and his vision needed a moment to adjust to the dullness of the emergency lights that glowed softly from strips pulled low across the sharp angles where floor met the wall. He’s in a hallway. A hallway? He had gone to his room, alone, at what the clock had told him was two in the morning—when you’re floating amongst the stars, surrounded by the blackness of space, jammed in between the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, time of day had no real meaning—and… And then he woke up. Houdini is suddenly aware of an ache stretching through his body as if he had been tossed around like the sort of dolls little girls used to play with almost two-hundred years ago.

He considers staying where he is, wrapping himself in blissful ignorance and calling this all a dream, but he knows—dream or not—he can’t lay there forever and, besides, the screaming was beginning to give him a headache. He slowly props himself up on his elbows and then stops, blinking as the shock settles over him like a blanket; he doesn’t recognize the large hallway that he finds himself in but that doesn’t matter as much as how it looks, which is completely and utterly trashed. He’d been to numerous parties that had resulted in the destruction of rooms—broken furniture, cracked displays, overturned artwork, scorched wallpaper—but this appeared as if some goliath with a bad temper had rampaged, monstrous arms swinging, careless as to what he had run into. The walls were dented and, in some places, caved in, revealing the small but opulent hotel rooms within (rooms leaking dark smoke, the sort you got from burning fabric).

There was a heavy pressure on his chest and he realized it was because he had been holding his breath.

That screaming, that endless screaming… Houdini sits up, pulls his sore legs towards him, his left knee cracking as he bends it and he opens his mouth to call out, to ask if somebody needed help before his muddled brain finally understood: it hadn’t been a human screaming after all.

There had been a video that he had only half paid attention to when he and the others had first boarded the _Ark Royal_ , Earth’s first luxury hotel floating in space. He had been secretly vying for an invite and finally—after the government types and billionaires had their chance—the entertainers had gotten theirs and here he was, one of the last true magicians without an extra boost of implants or wonder drugs, standing in the expansive welcome lobby, wasting his time watching a safety video while his luggage weighed down his shoulders. He vaguely recalls the droll voice of an AI Security Officer explaining what to do in the event of an emergency, noting the presence of an alarm and flashing red lights, which it had demonstrated, much to the chagrin of the hundred or so people in the room.

That was what Houdini was hearing now: not the howling of a person in trouble, but the wail of an alarm.

“Okay,” he says, his mouth bone dry. “Alright.” He stands, absently goes to brush off his clothes and notices his hands are shaking. He settles amongst the destruction and tries to go over it in his head: He had dinner, he mingled, he pulled off a few tricks, he went to bed alone and now he was here. He closes his eyes, squeezes them tight, forces himself to block out the noise, but there’s nothing there. His memory has been wiped clean, hours (God, he hoped it was only hours and not days) missing like pieces erased from a video. He touches his head, feels around for blood or a bump, thinks maybe he had hit it hard enough to scramble things like the powdered eggs he grew up on but there was nothing. ‘Nothing’ seemed to be a running theme of these past few minutes, Houdini thinks. Unease coils low in his guts, makes a home for itself and he allows it to stay.

He picks slowly through the broken pieces, doesn’t grasp that he’s looking for bodies until he realizes he can’t find them. If something bad happened, if—god forbid—they were attacked, wouldn’t there be people? Even if others had managed to clamber into the escape shuttles, not everybody would make it. That was just the depressing fact of catastrophe: people always got left behind. But he couldn’t be the only one. It didn’t make sense. _None_ of this made sense. Houdini finds a display monitor in the wall near a malfunctioning door, the large screen shattered, but he attempts to use it anyway, fingers dancing over barely legible scrawls and glitchy menus. The tip of a finger glides accidentally over one of the cracks and small pop of electricity sends tingles through his skin. He yanks his hand away, shaking it and hissing through his teeth. It was getting him nowhere anyway. If there was any information to be found, he wouldn’t be reading about it there.

There had to be a monitor or terminal that wasn’t fried but he had no idea where to even begin to search for one. Everything on board had been operated and handled by computers but, without them, navigating through the ship would be a pain. He hadn’t bothered to memorize the layout; he knew where the dining area was, where the bathrooms were and where his room was located. There had been no point in studying places he was never going to be but now he found himself wishing he had cared. He’d never be able to get through the door he currently stood in front of without forcing it open but the weighty metal could never be pushed by a single pair of arms (not even _he_ was that confident in himself) and the chances of sliding through without risking being crushed were too high.

Another hallway stretched out to his left and he stares down it, as if waiting for something to come out and greet him, before turning back the way he came.

 

.  .  .  .

 

He searches through the two rooms with open walls (the ones with doors still closed were locked from the inside and he attempts to knock, to call out in case people were hiding but there’s no answer) and he finds the beds ripped apart, clothes and personal belongings strewn across the floor. The shower in the second room is still running, the hot water now burning cold as if the person inside it had fled, fully naked, at the first sign of trouble. He rolls up his sleeve to reach inside and turn the knob until the water stops and the pipes gurgle at him. There was nowhere to dry his skin so he reluctantly wipes his arm off on his pants and then hesitates, staring down at himself. He was sure he had gotten undressed, had slipped into his pyjamas, but he now he was wearing the same clothes he had on when he had changed for dinner.

His hands were trembling once again, but it was entirely possible they had never stopped.

 

.  .  .  .

 

Houdini wanders what feels like hours, moving in an endless loop and he cursed whomever designed the _Ark Royal_. From the outside it clearly resembled a whale—one of the last few ancient mammals that still roamed the Earth, untouched by extinction and human interference—and, while it had seemed beautiful at first, it was later obvious that it only served to make the insides as irregular and impractical as possible. What he saw as he walked was more of the same: damage, wreckage, emptiness.

He finds an elevator eventually, fruitlessly jams his finger against the buttons on the wall but nothing comes.

“Of course,” he says, almost finds himself laughing in that sort of maniacal, nervous way, finally noticing a little ways to his right a door with the black letters LADDER stamped onto the metal. It was there, he figured, for maintenance and employees amuses himself by trying to imagine the wealthy men and women in the finery, gold and silver jewelry jangling as they climbed like children on a playground. The door opens easily, sliding noiselessly into the wall and he hesitates, frowning at what looks like the vertical spinal column of a horizontal ship. He’d never had much of a problem with tight spaces but he still found himself faltering; what laid before him was nothing but a tube, small platforms a few feet above and below where there were doorways to other floors. One slip or bout of unexpected vertigo could end with, at best, a broken back.

“Don’t have much of a choice, though, do I?” He says to himself, feet clanking noisily against metal as he approaches the ladder, fingers curling around cool steel. Up or down, did it really matter?

He decides to go down.

 

.  .  .  .

 

The door directly below him is sealed tight, the next one bulging from the inside out, as if something had been thrown with extraordinary force. Even if Houdini could get it open, he was unsure if he wanted to chance possibility of confronting whatever might be on the other side so he continues his descent. The next door opens as easily as the one on the floor he had left and the hallway that was laid out in front of him looks so nearly identical in its ruination that it makes his head swim. His feet touch the carpeted floor carefully as if he were afraid it would collapse underneath him.

It smells like burnt electronics with an undercurrent of something acidic that he could almost taste in the back of his throat. A loose, hanging wire snaps sparks at him just as he’s about to walk into it and he dodges backwards, hands covering his face, his heels slamming into a fallen chunk of _something_ that he had only just stepped over moments earlier. His balance lost, feet scrambling uselessly against the ground, he falls backwards and hits the ground hard, knocking the wind clean from his lungs with an almost audible _whoosh_.

“Ah, goddammit,” he says. “Shit.”

“Hello?” The voice is so unexpected that, if Houdini hadn’t already been on the floor, he might have found himself there anyway. He sits up, looks around but doesn’t see anybody. It must have been close because, with the continuous blaring of the alarm, he’d never be able to hear them over it unless they were right beside him but there seemed to be nobody there.

“Uh… hello?” He could have imagined it, he thinks. A desperate man hoping to find somebody, imagining a voice or mistaking the creak of a broken ship for words.

“In here,” the voice says, now unmistakably female.

“Where?” He still can’t find her, the shape of the hallway making it sound as if she’s coming from the ceiling, from somewhere behind him.

“Here, you idiot,” she snaps and he sees a flash of waggling fingertips poking through the crack in the bottom of a door right beside him that was barricaded shut from the outside with a dresser seemingly dragged out from another room. He had been sure that they were bolted to the floors (as if someone might try to steal them, although he had figured it was more to stop people from trying to rearrange things and ruin whatever aesthetic somebody had been going for) but now here one was, keeping someone locked away. The feet of the dresser are splintered like it had merely been lifted straight from the floor and it was propped up too neatly to have just been accidentally flung there. Someone had purposefully made sure she couldn’t leave the room she was in without help (unlike most of the other doors on the ship, the ones leading to the hotel rooms opened in and out instead of sliding back and forth and were the color of deep mahogany despite being made out of metal, an odd attempt at making the place look about five-hundred years older than it actually was).

Potentially dangerous or not, she was the first human being he’d found other than himself and that brought on a comforting wave of relief. He guesses it wouldn’t hurt to at least talk to her.

On hands and knees he crawls over, lowering himself on his stomach and folding his arms underneath his chin.

“Hey,” he says and then stops there. There’s a brief flash of light and then a shadow as she joins him in laying on the floor on her side of the door. He tries to turn his head, press it flat but he can’t see her. There’s only enough room to squeeze a few fingers but he doesn’t want to risk startling her by having her assume he was trying to make a grab at her.

“What the hell is going on?” She asks. “I can’t get out of here.”

“There’s, uh… There’s a dresser barricading the door.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” He tries to shrug from his position and then remembers she can’t see him. “Do you know what happened?”

“No,” she answers simply, hesitating before continuing. “I— I woke up about an hour ago in this room. I can’t remember—” She takes a steadying breath. “The alarm is blaring so I assume something went horribly wrong. How many survivors have you found?” It’s a weird question and not one he exactly expects to hear and it throws him off for a moment. “You still there?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Well, there’s me. And now you. So two. And I can’t remember anything either,” he adds before she can respond.

“I’m really the first person you’ve found?”

“Well, there are some floors I couldn’t access. I had to climb the service ladder just to get here. There could be others.”

“Okay,” she says. They lapse into an awkward silence and she clears her throat. “You think you could, I don’t know, get me out?”

“Oh! Right. Yeah. Hold on.” Houdini stands up and rolls his shoulders before leaning his entire body weight against the dresser. It’s a lot heavier than it seems and he’s sweating by the time he manages to move it far enough away from the door that there was adequate amount of space for a person to slip through. Wiping his face with his sleeve, he watches as a woman dressed in a navy blue security uniform exits the room and positions herself in front of him, observing the quiet chaos, expression unnervingly calm, the muscles him her jaw tightening as she clenches her teeth, taking everything in. Her gaze finally settles on Houdini and he tries a weak smile but she doesn’t return it. He almost thinks for a moment that she’s going to ask if he was responsible for this but instead she holds out her hand and says:

“Adelaide Stratton.”

“Harry Houdini,” he offers, shaking her hand, waiting for the recognition and he can see it flit across her face but she doesn’t mention it. “Security, huh?” He asks when he lets go of her, nods at the patch on her shoulder and she glances at it as well before looking back at him. “I thought they didn’t hire humans anymore.”

“They try not to,” she says and doesn’t expand on it any further. A sore subject, Houdini figures. Not the time for prying. That would come later once they’ve figured things out. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Going to bed. Got under the covers, closed my eyes and then I woke up in a hallway with the alarm going off and the place a complete mess,” he says. The word ‘mess’ was a bit of an understatement, all things considered, but it was the best he could do. He pulls a nervous hand through his curled hair. “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even on the same floor as my room.”

“And what floor is that?”

“Hm?”

“Your room. What floor is your room on?”

“Oh. Twenty-nine. Pretty sure, at least. I came from two floors down though. I have no clue—”

“Thirty-nine,” she interrupts him. “You came from the thirty-ninth floor. This is thirty-seven.” She hesitates to let him absorb the information and he blinks slowly at her, his heart suddenly racing. How could he fall asleep on the twenty-ninth floor and end up ten floors above that without knowing how he got there? “I was patrolling on the forty-fifth,” Adelaide was saying. “Somebody called my name and then… well, I was in that room. That was about…” 

“Two in the morning,” he says at the same time she does. “This is really fucking—”

“—Bizarre,” she fills in for him and he very nearly laughs. 

“That’s a nice way of putting it, I guess.” They share a moment of quiet, neither of them particularly sure of what to say, the shock of the situation still catching up to them. Houdini watches as Adelaide brushes her hands over her hair, attempting to neaten it, strands falling away from the bun pulled onto the back of her head but she gives up fairly quickly, tugs at it to let it fall into a long ponytail. 

“Are you hurt?” She asks suddenly and Houdini shakes his head. 

“Don’t think so. You?” 

“I feel like someone’s thrown me around a bit but no, me neither.” She straightens the sleeves of her jacket and shifts on her feet. He felt that way too, but he was so used to his body hurting that he had pushed it out of his mind almost as soon as he was aware of it. “We should find our way to the top of the ship, to where the Captain’s room is. We’ll be able to call for help from there. Or at least we’ll be able to turn off this bloody alarm.” 

“Great,” Houdini says, extending his arm out to the side. “Lead the way.”

 

....

 

He follows her up the ladder he just climbed down, follows her then through doorways and down halls when she insists that they check the ones they can gain access to, and they maneuver through what feels like a maze without speaking, other than Houdini asking every now and then what floor they were on. He’s quietly impressed that she knows where she’s going but he figures she probably didn’t have much of a choice in knowing every inch of this place.

She stops somewhere in the middle of the fifty-first floor, hands on her hips, her head shaking as she looks around and he looks with her, but obviously isn’t seeing the same things she is. 

“What’s up?” He chances asking and she sighs, keeps shaking her head. 

“Nevermind. I thought I heard some—” She stops mid-sentence and Houdini’s about to ask if she’s sure, how could she hear anything that wasn’t right in front of her over the alarm but then he hears it too: a groan, just loud enough to know it’s there but not enough to know where it was coming from. 

“Hello!” Adelaide calls out, standing on her toes. “Where are you?” Another groan, a muffled sound that could have been someone saying “here!” and then, just out of the corner of his eye, Houdini sees an arm shoot up from behind an overturned bed that had been thrown from inside a nearby room. Houdini begins to make his way over to the arm without saying anything and he can hear Adelaide coming along behind him. 

Behind the disrupted bed sat a moustached man in suit, his leg trapped under a piece of broken ceiling. 

“Thank God,” he says, looking up at the pair of them. “I thought I might have been the only one left.” He runs a nervous hand through his dark hair. “I can’t move—” He motions towards his leg. “I tried.” 

“Alright,” Adelaide says evenly, nodding her head once. “Come on, Harry. Let’s get this off of him.” They push and strain and eventually flip it over, flinching as it lands on the floor with a wall shaking thud. “Can you stand?” 

“I think—” The man starts, pushes off the ground with his hands, balances on his good leg but starts to fall right back down when he tries to put weight on the bad one. “—Not,” he finishes, hands plastered flat against the wall as he leans against it, bent as if he were sitting on an invisible chair, hobbling slightly on one foot. He takes a moment, moves slow and manages to straighten himself out, his injured leg hovering a few inches off the floor. 

“There’s a medical station on the next floor up,” Adelaide says, “We can just—” But she stops herself, remembers at the same time that Houdini does: the elevators don’t work. “Right. Well. Everything is portable these days. I’ll get what we need then. I’d say just an OmiTech Boot for your leg and a dose of morphine for the pain.” 

“They have morphine here?” Houdini asks at the same time that the man says: “Not morphine.” 

“What?” Adelaide addresses the man, mostly ignoring Houdini’s startled comment other than to give him a brief look as if to say that if she had been considering sending him to get what they needed before, she definitely wasn’t considering now. Houdini, to his credit he thought, had never touched morphine. It was too difficult to get these days. 

“Morphine is too strong,” he says. “It’s not that badly hurt. About fifty milligrams of meperidine should work for a few hours at least, if they have it. It’s easier for me to handle if you plan on having me actually go anywhere while it’s in my system. Normally I’d say best not give me anything if you need three clear heads but I have a feeling the elevators are non-functional so there’s going to be a fair bit of walking involved. So… Right. You got that? Meperidine. Fifty milligrams. Might as well grab it all if you can,” he chuckles, but stops, looks uncomfortable as he regards their blank faces as they stare at him. “I’m a doctor,” he tells them finally, slowly as if he can't believe they don't know who he is. “Arthur Conan Doyle,” he says, offers his hand.

"Ah," Adelaide says, "Of course." She takes his proffered hand first, introduces herself and then says she’ll be right back, disappearing back towards where the ladder was that they came from a few minutes ago.

“Harry Houdini,” Houdini says once she’s left, although he feels as if it wasn’t entirely necessary. “You’re the author right? All those detective novels. I thought I recognized you.”

“Yes,” Doyle admits, as if this was the last thing he wanted to talk about. “And you’re the magician. The one—”

“Without enhancements,” Houdini finishes for him, stands a little taller. “The one and only.” Doyle grimaces. 

“I was going to say ‘the one who does all those foolish stunts’ but yes, that one, too.” Doyle coughs seemingly more out of filling the silence than anything else and stares at the floor. “Do you— do you know what happened?” 

“No. Neither of us do,” he replies, referring to Adelaide. “Everything was normal and then—” 

“—You woke up somewhere else,” Doyle says. “With the ship looking like… this.” 

“Like this,” Houdini repeats. “Yeah.” 

 

.... 

 

Adelaide returns ten minutes later with a large bag she hadn’t had before slung across her chest, stuffed with what looked like everything she could find in all the drawers and cabinets.

“I cleared the place out. At least what I could fit in this bag. You never know,” she says with a shrug, lifting the strap over her head and lowering it carefully to the floor before crouching down to dig through it, pulling an OmniTech Boot from the very bottom, bottles and boxes sinking further into the bag once the bulky obstruction had been removed. “Here we go,” she says, carefully removing Doyle’s shiny black shoe, guiding Doyle’s foot into the bulky and heavy, grey boot. She tightens the buckles and snaps them closed. “How is it?” She asks as she stands and they watch as Doyle tentatively puts more and more weight on it. He takes a couple steps forward, winces, stops and then tries again, dragging the foot against the floor instead of lifting it. 

“It’ll do,” he says. 

“I’ve got the meperidine as well,” she says, pulling a small needle, a small helping of a clear liquid wobbling inside as she moved her hands. “If you still want it.” 

“Please,” he says, but takes the needle from her before she can do it herself. She holds her hands up, palms facing him and takes a step back, turns to address Houdini as if trying to give the man privacy. 

“It was remarkable,” Adelaide tells him, looks back at Doyle when she hears him let out a slow breath of air. “I expected the medical station to look like the rest of the ship. Possibly looted at the very least but it was completely untouched. It’s like nobody knew it was even there.” 

“Or they didn’t care,” Houdini says, which doesn’t make it any less strange. 

“Not what they were looking for?” Doyle suggests. “If they were even looking for anything at all.” The thought that someone—or multiple someones—had done this simply for the thrill of it was unsettling and the three of them fell silent as they allowed the thought to hover over their heads like a cloud. 

“Well,” Adelaide says, clapping her hands together, startling both Houdini and Doyle. “No use standing around here any longer. Just a few more floors to go.” 

“Where are we going, exactly?” Doyle asks, following the pair as they head back, once again, to the ship’s black metal spine. 

“To get help,” Adelaide says, and Houdini follows with a muttered: “We hope.”

 

.... 

 

They have Doyle in between them as they ascend and he climbs slowly but only slips three times and doesn’t complain (although Houdini figures the painkiller had a lot to do with both that and the lack of balance). Houdini asks him if he’s alright the third time he has to push Doyle forwards, his hand on the small of his back until he regains his stability and he mumbles something about being fine through gritted teeth and then keeps going. 

It turns out that a “few floors” to Adelaide actually meant _nine_ and Houdini wonders if she really didn’t think it was that many or if she had under-exaggerated in hopes that they’d be more willing to continue the journey upwards if they didn’t realize it would take so long until they were more than halfway there.

“End of the line,” Adelaide says, stepping off on the final platform but when taps the panel to slide the door open, it cracks only slightly and then doesn’t budge any further. “Oh,” she says. There’s a space large enough to curl fingers around to the other side and she pulls, only moving it an inch before it gets stuck once again. “Are you going to help or just stand there?” She asks, turning the best she can towards the other two and they crowd together on the small space, all of them beginning to heave. With their combined efforts it moves sluggishly before finally hitting a point where it thrusts sideways as if it had simply been stuck on a piece of gum which had been dislodged by their exertion. The movement catches them all off guard but, unfortunately, Houdini is closest to the edge of the platform and there it was, his original fear coming true. He yelps and then closes his eyes, doesn’t want to watch himself dropping to the bottom of the cannula, until he realizes that he’s not actually falling at all. One eye opens and then another to see both Doyle and Adelaide holding on to an arm each, only pulling him back to his feet once they realize he had closed his eyes out of acceptance of his assumed fate and not because he had passed out and become dead weight. 

“Thanks,” he finally manages to say and Doyle nods, lets him go, Adelaide patting Houdini absently on the elbow as her fingers unclench from his jacket. 

“Hopefully,” she says, stepping out into the hallway, “We won’t have to bother with this again.” It was a nice thought but Houdini didn’t honestly trust that this would be the last time they’d have to rely on that ladder to get them somewhere and the way that Adelaide says it makes it seem like she felt the same way. 

“You can fix the elevators?” Doyle queries and Adelaide awkwardly lifts a shoulder. 

“Anything’s possible.” 

The hallway looks exactly the same as all the others as far as what had been done to it, although instead of a once-opulently decorated and aesthetically pleasing environment, the walls were gunmetal grey, the floor bare and noisy underfoot, the emergency lights duller, leaving the area to feel ten times smaller than it already was, placed at the very nose of the _Royal_ whale. They kept close together—a triangle with Adelaide leading the very point—and Houdini felt Doyle reluctantly listing sideways towards him, leaning against him just enough to keep up the pace with the fast moving woman in front.

“Are we really the only ones left?” Doyle murmurs and Houdini thinks he might have been asking himself and not the others but he responds anyway.

“Seems like it. Maybe they left without us.” Houdini doesn’t even believe that himself but he’s still slightly put-off when Doyle scoffs at him.

“Here we are,” Adelaide says, stopping in front of a large glass double-door that looked inside a spartan office, a large curved window facing out towards the stars on the other side of a heavy desk, the surface most likely spread with numerous different displays, all of them hopefully flashing with information. “Now I’ll just…” She leans towards a small pad on the side of the door, makes a few noises of disatisfaction, smacks it and then stands straight. “I should be able to put the code in and the doors will open.”

“Okay…” Houdini prompts, feels a ‘but’ coming and he hates those. 

“It’s broken. It’s fried, just like nearly everything else. I’m surprised the alarm and emergency lights are even still running.” She exhales slowly, exasperated, pulls at her ponytail, and then puts her hands on her hips. “We’ll have to break down the door.”

“Shouldn’t that glass be bulletproof or something?” Doyle suggests and Adelaide snorts.

“This is a hotel, not a military vessel. Who’s going to try and shoot the captain on a floating whale?”

“Point taken,” Doyle says. “There’s enough carnage around here. Bound to be something hard enough to shatter glass.”

“You could kick it,” Houdini offers, pointing to Doyle’s booted foot. Doyle glances down at it and then looks back to Houdini, his mouth drawn into a thin line, unamused. “What? Those OmniTech Boots are are like wearing lightweight concrete. I’ve had one or two on in my time. Besides, you’re hopped up on pain meds. You won’t feel it.”

“I’m not putting my _injured foot_ through a glass door!” Doyle argues, turns to Adelaide for support and she lays her hands out in front of her as if holding an invisible tray.

“I don’t like it either...” she says, trails off and Doyle turns back to Houdini, preparing a smug expression, but frowns when she continues: “But if we can’t find anything else, it might be our only option.” 

“Ha!” Houdini lets out, slapping Doyle a little too hard on the shoulder before walking back the way they had come, keeping his eyes directed towards the ground, kicking at pieces of debris, trying to find something heavy enough to use as a projectile or a battering ram.

“Please tell me,” Doyle says when Houdini comes back a short while later, “That you found something.”

“Think it came from the ceiling,” Houdini says, holds up a two foot long, hefty piece of steel that he had discovered on the floor, leaning against a wall. “Hope it wasn’t holding up anything too important.” He grips the back end with one hand, rests the length of it along his right arm, plants his feet as firmly as he can on the ground and reels his shoulders back. “Here we go.” The first whack makes his teeth rattle but the cobweb cracks in the glass are promising and, once he had managed to stop vibrating, he attacks it once more. “Come on,” he mutters after the second time doesn’t finish the job, running his tongue around inside his mouth. “I’m too young for dentures.”

The fourth time does the trick and the glass shatters noiselessly into tiny almost diamond-like pieces. He clears a wider hole and then drops the metal with a thud, examining his hands: red and a little sore, but no damage. And he kept all his teeth. So far, so good. Adelaide ducks through, careful not to brush against the sharp edges left behind and Houdini is about to follow when he realizes that Doyle isn’t moving, instead just standing there, oddly still, staring into the distance but not exactly looking at anything specific.

“Hey,” Houdini says, waves a hand in front of his face, snaps his fingers and Doyle jerks, blinks rapidly, and suddenly he’s back in the room. “You okay?”

“Hm? Yes. I must have…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, shakes his head as if attempting to clear it of the same cobwebs that Houdini had smashed into the glass door. “Fine,” he says. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Houdini says, stops and then opens his mouth to say something else, except he’s cut off by Adelaide calling them over, which Doyle uses as an excuse to exit the conversation and lurch forward into the room ahead.

 

.... 

 

“Alright,” Adelaide says, her small frame enveloped by the large Captain’s chair she’s seated in. “I’m getting intermittent power to the displays so everything keeps blinking in and out on me. It’s slow, too, but I think I may have at least managed to figure out how to...” She taps a screen to the right and the alarm disappears, at long last. Houdini’s ears ring in the sudden silence and a strange part of him almost finds himself wishing for the irritating sound to return so he doesn’t have to focus fully on the absolute stillness around them now. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get full power back. Not from here at least. It looks like—” She pauses, waits for the screen she was staring at to pop back and frowns. “No,” she says. “Oh, no. That’s not good.”

“Don’t say that.” Houdini leans over her shoulder, tries to see what she’s seeing but he can’t make heads nor tails of the lines of white text and computer-drawn line images of machines and graphs. “I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”

“This…” She taps a couple different screens, goes back to the one she had been glaring at earlier. “We’re dead in the water.”

“What?” Houdini looks at her profile and she sits back heavily in the chair, puts a hand on her head and then pulls it away to gestures at the displays.

“The _Royal_ … She’s crippled. We’ve got enough power to keep the lights and oxygen on, to stop us from crashing to Earth but other than that… we’re like a piece of driftwood. Practically disemboweled, too. Whatever did this punched right through the underside of the ship.” Adelaide pulls up a fuzzy, glitched diagram of the ship, points to an area at the very bottom that was flashing bright red. “A substantial amount of the bottom fifteen floors are gone. The _Royal_ must have sealed the gaping hole underneath the fifteenth before it lost most major power but who knows how long that will hold. Escape shuttles are probably gone or damaged. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Crippled,” Houdini says. “I get it.” He turns to where Doyle is resting against a curved edge of the desk, checks to see if he’s in this conversation as well or if he’s zoned out again and he finds that Doyle’s not even facing them, his gaze settled out the window, eyes narrowed, a hand to his chin. “You heard her, right? We’re—” Doyle flits a dismissive hand in Houdini’s direction and then points. 

“The stars…” he starts. 

“We’ve lost him,” Houdini says, turns back towards Adelaide. 

“No,” Doyle says, brings their attention back towards the window. “Do they look… strange to anyone else?” Adelaide swivels her seat around, Houdini placing himself behind the chair, fingers gripping the top, nails digging into the leather. He stares, doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary and is about to reject Doyle’s observation as an undiagnosed concussion when he hesitates, tilts his head just to the side. They do seem… off. For a brief moment it’s as if somebody had swiped a clear jelly across the window and he’s about to say something when a panel behind him begins to signal almost impatiently, distracting him and, all at once, everything is normal again. He can’t even remember what he had been looking for in the first place. 

Adelaide turns her back to the outside—Doyle joining them this time as if he, too, had forgotten his earlier comment—and smacks the screen to bring it back to her.

“What’s it say?” Houdini asks, because someone had to.

“I’m not sure…” Fingers scroll through menus and walls of text before stopping on a flashing white square outlined in red. “A message.”

“From whom?” Doyle asks, standing on her other side.

“Doesn’t say.” Adelaide presses the pad of her index finger to the screen, swipes to open it and the three of them collectively hold their breath as they listen, but all it is is thirty seconds of static and a low clicking noise with no obvious pattern. It ends abruptly and none of them speak. She plays it again but it doesn’t make any more sense the second time around.

“When was it sent?” Doyle asks and Adelaide stares at the screen.

“Six hours ago. Not sure why it only alerted us to it now. Must be because of the low power and the fried systems. Took it a moment to catch up. It came from...” she starts to answer the next question before it even had to be asked, “Somewhere out there,” she says vaguely, gesturing back towards the window, eyes narrowed at the screen.

“From Earth.” Houdini offers and Adelaide shakes her head.

“No. Look… The signal’s not right. See here?” She brings up an old message—a note from the Captain’s wife—and moves it underneath the strange, most recent one. “These numbers.” She points to the message from Earth, directs their attention to a string of numbers stretched across the bottom. “And then these,” she says, points to the newer one, to the numerals along the bottom as well, expects them to understand immediately but frowns when they don’t seem to be following along. “They’re different. It’s not some random string each time. Not entirely,” Adelaide explains. “The first three numbers, zero-six-five? That means this is from Earth. The next four are the continent, the others after that the state, etcetera, etcetera. This one? Seven-two-eight? I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen _any_ of these numbers before.” 

“Do all the planets have their own area codes?” Houdini asks. 

“Yes, actually,” Adelaide answers flippantly and then hesitates, glances curiously at Houdini. “Hold on. Why am I telling you all of this? Didn’t they teach you any of this in school?”

“Probably,” Houdini admits and Adelaide almost smiles. They did, indeed, spend a whole day or two in elementary teaching the kids a song that was supposed to help them remember the area codes of the solar system, another two weeks having them then memorize the continents and the areas of whatever country they happen to live. Most children—much like Houdini—forgot them all as soon as they had passed their tests. Technology did all the work for them. What was the point in keeping such large strings of numbers tucked away in their heads? The only address (as it were) that Houdini remembered was his childhood home, but that was badgered into him the same way his phone number had been. “What’s Mars?”

“Four-one-nine,” Adelaide says easily.

“Jupiter?”

“Six-zero-six.”

“Ur—”

“Harry!” Doyle cuts him off, looks at him like a disapproving father, but the expression shifts quickly into frustration mixed with sorrow. “How can you be so… so cavalier? We’re stranded in space, our memories of the past few hours are gone and so is seemingly everyone else, the ship is in ruins and you want to know the area code to Uranus!” His voice rises as he speaks, shouts the name of the planet, his cheeks flushed as he puts his hands to his face, propping up his chin in the palm of his hand, his other arm holding up his elbow. “Besides, everyone knows it’s eight-eight-eight,” he grumbles.

“I get it,” Houdini says after a moment. “We’re all freaked out. But panicking isn’t going to help anybody right now, is it?.”

“I’m _not_ panicking,” Doyle insists.

“You are. Little bit,” Houdini says, pinching his thumb and index finger together and then creating a small space between them.

“I have children,” Doyle says suddenly and Adelaide’s eyes widen slightly.

“They weren’t on board were they?”

“No,” Doyle assures her and he gazes out the window once again. “They’re on Earth. They’re with the NannAI.” NannAI’s were basically semi-intelligent robot maids: they cooked, they did the basic cleaning and made sure the kids went to bed on time. They’d never really replace the real thing, which in turn could never replace parents, but it was good for people who needed the extra help but weren’t so keen on going through the process of hiring a stranger. An AI you could program. Besides, studies (funded by the company that created the NannAIs) showed that the kids didn’t get quite as attached to a machine with no distinct personality as they did a real human, which apparently stopped them from growing too distant from their already distant mothers and fathers.

“Where’s your wife?” Houdini asks but Doyle doesn’t respond. He thinks, for a minute, that he just hadn’t heard him and goes to ask again a bit louder, before realizing Doyle had, instead, purposely ignored the question. 

“We’ll get you back to them,” Adelaide says, putting as much hope as she could muster into it. “I just have to figure out how to send a message. Somebody will come for us.”

“Mhm,” Doyle grunts, as if he didn’t believe a single word she had said. 

 

....

 

Adelaide banishes them to the other side of the room, claiming she couldn’t work with them hovering over her, and they find a table that folded out from a wall near the cubicle that was supposed to be a bedroom and a couple of chairs that needed to be put together, the pieces hidden in a small cubby hole underneath the uniform bed that the Captain had been relegated to.

“You’d think,” Houdini says, peering around the room, “The Captain of this ship would have nicer digs.” Doyle coughs in reply and they lapse into silence, listening to the creaks and moans of an incapacitated vessel and of Adelaide moving and talking to herself as she worked the displays.

“They could have gassed us,” Doyle says, apropos of nothing in particular.

“What are you—”

“We could have been gassed. Depending on how long we were out for, it could have cleared long before we woke up. Could account for our memory loss.”

“Doesn’t explain why none of us were where we last remember being, though,” Houdini counters, pauses before asking: “What were you doing before—?”

“Showering,” Doyle says and Houdini ponders idly if the shower he had turned off soon after he had woken up was the same one Doyle had been using. He considers bringing it up but instead asks:

“Fully clothed?”

“Of course I wasn’t! I was—” Doyle starts, stops, momentarily flustered. “Well, I wasn’t wearing _this_.”

“Me neither. Does your gas account for any of that?”

“It’s not _my_ gas,” Doyle says. “It was just a theory. Do you have anything better?”

“Not yet,” Houdini says. “But I’m working on it.”

“That can’t be right,” They hear Adelaide say from where they left her, frustration wavering around the edges of her voice.

“What’s the matter?” Houdini asks but she doesn’t reply, either because she’s too lost in her own thoughts or she didn’t hear him. He gets up and walks over to her, asks again and she jumps slightly at his sudden appearance by her side and then sighs, gesturing to the screen in front of her.

“I tried to send a message home but it bounced back.”

“Wrong number?” Houdini guesses and Adelaide makes a face.

“Too much interference.”

“Interference?” Doyle calls out from where he’s still sitting. “What in the world could be causing that much interference out here? It’d have to be something huge, wouldn’t it? A satellite?”

“Not likely,” Adelaide says. “They’re not _that_ large, I don’t think. All I know is that there’s too much of it. We can’t get through. I tried four times,” she adds, to stop them before they suggest she give it another attempt.

“Can you send it somewhere else?” Houdini asks and Adelaide looks up at him, brow furrowed.

“Interference like this isn’t exactly a one-way street. Where else would you have me send it? Mars is still under construction. It’s just worker drones out there. Every other planet is empty as far as I know, unless there’s something you’re not telling us. Besides, it would take anybody further out than Mars years to get to our location.”

“A cargo ship.” Houdini says. “There’s always a few of those floating around out here.”

“Delivering equipment. People to fix the drones,” Adelaide says, tsk-ing as if admonishing herself for not coming up with that idea on her own. “I suppose I could give it a shot, but it’s not as if I have any specific numbers to target. I’ll just have to send it out into the unknown. If it manages to bust through the interference, it could be hours before it finds someone. Could take even more than that for them to find us.” 

“I don’t think we have much choice at the moment to do anything else but wait,” Doyle says, finally standing and shuffling his way over to join them. “We have time.”

“We’ve got nothing _but_ time,” Houdini agrees and they watch as Adelaide brushes her fingers against the screen, sending their cry for help blindly out into the universe.

 

....

 

“You know, when I said we had ‘nothing but time’, I didn’t think we’d be spending it just sitting here,” Houdini says later, the three of them seated in the chairs surrounding the fold-out table, not speaking to one another, waiting and listening for the telltale beep of an incoming message or the unfortunate whine of the one sent to Earth being repeatedly bounced back, like a rubber ball smacking against a brick wall. “We have to do something.”

“Agreed,” Doyle says and the two of them look Adelaide.

“I was hoping someone would suggest that,” she replies, her tense shoulders sinking slightly, as if she had been holding that in since they sat down but didn’t want to be the first to break the silence. “I’ve been thinking about what we could do and I figured we could go from floor to floor, walk the halls like I do when I’m on patrol.”

“Look for clues,” Houdini says. He’s not sure what they could find other than debris, but he’s willing to do whatever it took to not waste away there any longer and at least make some kind of an attempt to dig up some answers, no matter how fruitless that attempt may be. “One of us can stay behind, keep an eye on the displays.”

“Just so you know,” Doyle says, “I’m fully aware that when you say ‘one of us’, you mean me but I won’t stay in here alone. I’m not completely immobile. I’ll manage.”

“I can open the speakers,”Adelaide says. “If someone tries to call us, we’ll be able to hear it from anywhere on the ship. Nobody has to be left behind.”

“Good,” Doyle says at the same time Houdini says: “Fine.” 

 

....

 

“Now, just for clarity’s sake,” Adelaide says as they begin their ponderous circuit around their current floor, studying the walls and floors, trying every door they pass and poking through the rooms they were allowed into, “Let’s go over one more time what we know.”

“We all know what we know,” Houdini says, kicking over a small cabinet that had fallen from the wall inside a nearly claustrophobic bathroom. The other two waited for him in the doorway and then parted to let him out when it became obvious that there wasn’t anything helpful to find in there. “I think we’d be better off listing everything we _don’t_ know.” Adelaide sighs.

“Alright. What we don’t know: Pretty much everything. That about covers that, doesn’t it?”

“Doyle thinks we could have been gassed,” Houdini offers and Adelaide turns to stare at Doyle, who clears his throat uncomfortably.

“It’s possible. I don’t know quite how else we could all be suffering from the same problem. Unless…” He starts but then halts himself, seems almost ashamed of the idea he nearly proposed. 

“Unless what?” Adelaide prompts, getting him to continue with his thought.

“Unless,” Doyle finally persists, “Someone messed with our heads.” 

“ _Someone_ messed with our heads?” Houdini asks, putting emphasis on the word ‘someone’ to make sure he had heard him correctly. “Messed how exactly?” 

“I’m not sure yet. I don’t— Somebody could have gone in there, purposefully snipped out our memories of the event that caused all of this.”

“How,” Houdini laughs, “With magic? I hate to have to be the one to break it to you, Doyle, but magic isn't real.” Both Adelaide and Doyle stop walking and it takes a moment for Houdini to realize this before stopping himself and backtracking to where they stood.

“You’re a magician,” Adelaide says, her tone completely deadpan.

“You two don’t really believe I have special powers or something, do you? It’s all distraction, quick hands, and a lot of planning,” Houdini says. “Basically, anyway.”

“Of course we don’t believe—” Doyle begins to say. “It was just an idea. Forget I mentioned it, alright?”

“Sure,” Houdini says. “Fine with me.” They find their way back to the ladder, the black metal glinting in the ambient light.

“So much for never having to deal with this again,” Adelaide says as a way of an apology for not being able to fix the elevators and she grips the rungs, starting to climb down.

 

....

 

“Can I ask you something?” Houdini requests to Adelaide’s profile as they make their way around the oblong shape of the fifty-seventh floor.

“I suppose,” she says, eyes him cautiously.

“You being a Security Officer. How does that work?”

“I thought they didn’t put humans in uniforms anymore,” Doyle says from where he’s hobbling along to Adelaide’s left. He’s not wrong. Two years ago, human police were almost entirely replaced by AIs. Nobody seemed particularly happy about the changes but, despite loud protests from citizens and governments alike, humans were pushed off the streets, out of cars and behind desks, watching their jobs being taken over by genderless, humanoid machines that used math and programs to fight crime instead of instinct and psychology. Humans were still hired to appease the dissenters, Adelaide explains to them, but it was all for show.

“We’re novelties,” she says, a tone of bitterness in her voice. “They just stick us behind desks or to keep an eye on people like you in ridiculous floating space whales.”

“So then why’d you stay? Why even join in the first place?” Houdini asks.

“Maybe I’m just trying to prove something. Or maybe it’s because one day those AIs will turn on us, just like they did at Ortov-Chen Technologies. Who do you expect they’ll want to pick up the slack when they have to be shut down and destroyed?”

“Hey,” Doyle calls out, effectively putting an end to the conversation, “Look at this.” They turn to see him stalled somewhere behind them by a bit of exposed wall, scrutinizing a thick pipe that was, upon closer inspection by Houdini and Adelaide, leaking some sort of liquid from a seam that linked the two parts of the heavy alloy together. It has the consistency of water and, at first, Houdini figures it’s simply that—unsettlingly _dirty_ water—but it’s thicker than it should be, almost as if somebody had pumped the water lines with tar or black mud.

“What the hell is that?” He asks, reaches out to dip his finger in it, recoiling when Doyle slaps his hand away.

“Don’t touch it, you idiot,” he scolds, says it as if he couldn’t believe he even had to tell a grown man that at all and then leans forward, sniffing at it instead. “No smell.”

“Really?” Houdini copies what Doyle had done, and so does Adelaide. “Huh.”

“When the computer was listing everything wrong with the ship—and believe me, it was a lot—” Adelaide says, “—It never mentioned this. Water was clean and fully functional.”

“Functional, maybe,” Houdini says. “Clean… no." 

“I wonder…” Adelaide mutters, more to herself than the others, before starting to dig through the bag of medical supplies she had thought to bring along. She pulls out a full bottle of pills, inspects the label and decides that they aren’t important, twists off the cap and dumps them into the bottom of the bag, leaving them with an empty container. “Perhaps we could take some,” she propositions, holding the bottle out to Doyle, who accepts it and blows at the inside the clear it from whatever powder was left behind, using the hem of his jacket to clean out the rest. 

“And do what?” Houdini inquires. “Drink it?”

“We’ll be down towards the medical station soon enough,” Doyle says, glances at Adelaide to confirm and she nods once. “There could be something there that might help identify it. Even a child’s toy microscope would be better than nothing.” He positions the bottle under the leak but only takes a few drops before pulling back and spinning the cap on.

“Hold on,” Houdini says, “That’s it?”

“That’s all we need,” Doyle tells him. He holds the bottle up close to his eyes, moves it from side to side and they all watch as it rolls easily from one end to the other, leaving behind no trail as if it were slippery oil. “Strange.”

“No kidding,” Houdini says.

 

....

 

“Here we are,” Adelaide says, hopping off the ladder onto the platform. It had taken almost an hour (possibly more) to make it to the level with the medical station, simply because she had insisted that they keep up with their circular walks on all the floors in between and had pointedly ignored their restlessness. They hadn’t found anything particularly useful since then, nor did any sparkling new ideas come to any of their minds and Houdini had begun to regret agreeing to what now seemed like an entirely ludicrous plan. He had subtly tried to gain Doyle’s attention somewhere on the forty-ninth floor, to see if he could quietly get him to agree that this was pointless now that they had a new mission wobbling in an empty pill bottle but he seemed to be completely lost in his own mind, his gaze almost unfocused as if he wasn’t looking where he was going but somewhere beyond the walls they were passing. “It should be right around this… corner.”

Adelaide comes to an abrupt stop in the wide doorway and the other two run into her, not expecting it. She stumbles slightly, bounces on her toes before landing flat back on the ground. The room didn’t look like someone had merely emptied the drawers and cabinets and then left; it was as if a tornado with claws had swirled through, ripping and clobbering anything in it’s way like it was trapped, despite the fact that Adelaide had left the door wide open. The lights in the room flickered and buzzed, electronics and machinery popped, sparked.

“It’s like somebody rampaged through here with a sledgehammer,” Doyle says softly, marveling at the level of destruction.

“This is not how I left it,” Adelaide says, defending herself although there had been no accusations lobbed directly at her, “I may have left a few drawers open but this… I didn’t do this.”

“Somebody else must have. There’s someone else still on board.” Houdini suggests and he wants to believe it. He has to.

“But why?” Adelaide asks. “Wouldn’t they want to help? How could they do this on their own?”

“The AIs then,” Houdini says. “You said yourself it was only a matter of time. They malfunctioned. Destroyed the place. They could still be running around. We’ve just been lucky enough to miss them.” 

“They blew a hole in the bottom of the ship, too, did they? With what? Their minds?” Doyle retorts and Houdini gives him a look. “I heard all of that before. Deaf, blind. Crippled. It doesn’t explain what happened to us, either, by the way. The last time I checked, the only way an AI can scramble a human’s brain is if they’re plugged directly into them. So unless either of you are hiding a port somewhere on your heads, I doubt they could have orchestrated something of this scale. Unless they’ve been purposely planning this for months. Which, I admit, is not an idea I want to dwell very hard on.” 

“I think, maybe,” Adelaide says after waiting for Doyle to finish, “That we should go back upstairs for now. I can go through the computers again, see if there’s anything new, anything I missed. I don’t think we’re sa—”

A thunderous, screaming static roars suddenly out of the ship’s speakers, overwhelming them and they hold their hands to their ears but it doesn’t do any of them any good. Underneath the tumult is a sort of unbearable click that feels like explosions deep in Houdini’s brain and he holds his arms tightly around his head, feels the other two crowding closer to him, their bodies warm and trembling. 

“What is that?” Doyle shouts to be heard over the cacophony but, even then, he’s barely audible.

“I don’t know!” Adelaide yells back. “It sounds like that message I played earlier!”

“We have to get out of here!” Houdini bellows and then feels stupid the moment the words leave his mouth. Where would they go? They could go back to the Captain’s room, try to turn the noise off, but moving seemed all at once impossible, as if the sound itself was magnetizing them to the floor. His skin was going numb and there was a low, whining hum in his ears that wasn’t there before and he bends further to the ground as if trying to make himself smaller but it did nothing to provide relief from the noise.

Then, without warning, it ceases, although the quiet itself was so immediate that Houdini thought for a few seconds that his eardrums had burst but, eventually, he hears Adelaide speaking through the ringing, her voice sounding as if she were calling to him from above as he held his breath under a few feet of water.

“What?” He asks and she tilts her head towards him, their foreheads nearly touching.

“I said: I think it’s over.” 

“Yeah,” Houdini says. “Right.” He looks over at Doyle, who’s still got his hands over his ears, his eyes closed, and Houdini stands in front of him, tapping him lightly on the arm. Doyle opens his eyes slowly and Houdini grasps his wrists, pulling them down, away from his head. “It’s over.”

“Yes,” Doyle says, taking his hands away from Houdini’s, his voice muffled, “I know.”

It takes almost twenty minutes before Houdini has almost gotten back most of his hearing. They had decided to stay where they were, Houdini and Adelaide sitting cross-legged on the floor, Doyle propped up against the opposite wall, his booted foot making it difficult to join them. Adelaide’s face is pale and Houdini gambles, puts a comforting hand on her knee. She stares at it, unsure, before patting his hand in return, which he takes as an acknowledgement, a thank you, and also: _you can move it now_. He looks over to Doyle next, who’s slumped over slightly, and jumps to his feet, walking over to lean against the wall beside him. He, too, looks grey and Houdini wonders if he himself was as drawn and ashen as they were. He holds his hands up instead, notices a small tremor and clears his throat, shoves them behind his back. 

He doesn’t think that a reassuring touch on Doyle would do much to help so he uses words instead.

“You alright?”

“No,” Doyle answers honestly. “Still believe this has something to do with malfunctioning AIs?” Houdini shrugs one shoulder, looks up at the ceiling where the sound had come from and starts kicking at the floor with his heel.

 

....

 

“It wasn’t the message. It couldn’t have been,” Adelaide says, fingers swiping over the displays stretched out in front of her. They had hiked back up to the top floor and Adelaide had immediately begun messing with the computer. Houdini and Doyle had grabbed the chairs they left at the small table, dragging them over to the other side of the desk to keep her better company while she worked. Houdini sat backwards, resting his chin on his arms as they stretched across the top of the seat, Doyle sitting sideways in his own, his bad leg propped up on Houdini’s chair in the space behind his back. “Messages don’t play automatically. So either someone was in here and opened it or—” 

“—Or it was live,” Doyle finishes for her. “Broadcasted to us from the PA system.”

“I don’t know anything that makes a noise like that,” Adelaide says weakly. “It sounded angry.”

“There is no ‘it’!” Houdini argues, sitting up. “We’re tired and more than a little rattled. This ship is broken, you said so yourself. The electronics are wonky. It… It’s not some _bogeyman_. Give me some time and I could come up with a long list of things that might have happened that doesn’t involve an angry creature screaming at us over the PA system.” Logic and reason was the only comfort that Houdini had left and he he was going to hold onto it until there were no more threads to cling to and he had no other option but to let go and be swallowed by the unexplained.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Adelaide says, although she sounds like she’s saying it more to get him to stop hounding them. “We should see if we can find some food or water. Maybe try to get some sleep.” 

 

.... 

 

The Captain has a tiny kitchen on the other side of the room, but all they find is a plastic jug of water, two bottles of whiskey and a handful of energy bars, the sort that the military are forced to chew on while shuttling through on long journeys, under the explanation that they couldn’t afford anything better. They’re bland and disintegrate like shortbread when they bite into them. Houdini manages to eat half before he can’t stand it anymore and curls the wrapper over the unfinished part, stuffing it into his pocket, regretting it almost immediately when he can feel it falling apart into crumbs.

There’s only one bed but the sleep that Adelaide had suggested never happens; Adelaide plants herself back at the console, moving her hands around, reading long lines of text, staring at diagrams. She rubs at her eyes occasionally with the palms of her hands, sighs, but keeps going. Houdini doesn’t know what she’s trying to find, but he’s not going to argue with her about it. Doyle has moved his chair behind the desk, taking Houdini’s with him to keep his leg elevated and he sits, staring out the window at the millions of stars outside, barely even blinking as if he’s hoping to catch them doing something wrong. There’s an itch at the back of Houdini’s mind when he watches him, like he had noticed something about those same stars awhile ago but he can’t put his finger on what it might have been.

He finds himself pacing the room for a little while before giving up and lying down in the bed, hands folded on his chest but all he does is stare up at the ceiling. There’s a lot about what has occurred recently that bothers him (as it should) but at the forefront of his mind is the question “How long?” How long were they really unconscious for? He had assumed it was only a few hours but what if it had been days? Weeks? The idea that they had been lost, out cold and floating possibly for months sends an involuntary shudder up his spine. There was no real way to tell one way or the other. The onboard computer could tell them it was still yesterday or fifteen years in the past if it wanted. That was the problem with technology, Houdini thinks: it was reliable until it wasn’t and, when it wasn’t, things had a tendency to go horribly, horribly wrong.

That was why he had resisted the enhancements and implants that his fellow magicians had succumbed to; sure, he’d be faster, would put less stress on his body, give him just a bit of an edge but he’s also seen those very same ‘enhancements’ send people to the hospital. Fast hands would suddenly be dead hands, paralyzed and numb. Brains would turn into nothing but goo and burnt wires. His mother had brought him up without drugs, without metal shoved under his skin to help him compete with his classmates. He didn’t need it then, he didn’t need it (or want it) now. People were captivated by him; he heard them discussing it after his shows, men and women saying that they had no idea an untouched human could do that, it was impossible, he’s remarkable. There was a negative part of him that knew that he was a novelty, just like Adelaide was to her superiors. At some point he wouldn’t be interesting anymore, but he figured he still had quite a few good years in him to ride the wave of simple human fascination before they got bored. People always got bored eventually. 

His musing is interrupted by someone limping over to the bed, casting a heavy shadow over him.

“Move over,” he hears Doyle say and Houdini blinks at him. The bed is just barely big enough to hold himself and he looks down before staring back up at Doyle’s obscured face. “Don’t make it weird,” Doyle says, as if that’s the entirety of the problem and Houdini moves over as far as he can, pressing his left side up against the cold wall, feeling Doyle climb in next to him, mirroring his position, his own hands folded together on his chest. Neither of them speak and Houdini thinks that Doyle may have actually managed to fall asleep but then he hears him say:

“What if you’re wrong.” 

“About what?”

“About what’s happening here. Is it really that difficult to consider it could be… something not human?” Doyle asks and Houdini lets out a slow, steady breath, turns to glance at Doyle’s profile before looking back to the ceiling. “They’ve discovered other small lifeforms on Mars, on asteroids,” Doyle continues without waiting for Houdini to answer his question. “Is it really inconceivable that there could be something much bigger out there?”

“Out there,” Houdini says, lifts an arm to point out at the wall, out towards the universe beyond where Earth was currently floating, past the rest of the planets dancing along in their solar system. “Maybe. Probably. But a hundred miles above Earth?” He drops his arm back down, laces his fingers together again. “We’d have found it years ago. Unless it was already coming for us and we just happened to be in the way.”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Doyle says.

“It’s too many coincidences,” Houdini tells him, “And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“You don’t believe in magic, either,” Doyle says. “What do you believe in, then?” Houdini doesn’t answer that right away either, and he’s not sure he could. He’s saved from having to say anything, though, when Adelaide wanders over, telling them to move their feet and she clambers onto the end of the bed, careful not to bother Doyle’s leg, pulling her knees up to her chest, sitting back against the wall.

“Find anything interesting?” Houdini asks after a moment.

“No,” she says. “There should be a log, _something_ that explains what went wrong. But there’s nothing. It’s like everything was fine and then it all just… stopped. The only thing it can tell me is that there’s a giant hole in the bottom.” Houdini snorts, can’t help himself, and he feels the two of them staring at him, unamused.

“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t exactly mean it.

 

....

 

Houdini wakes up with somebody’s hand plastered over his mouth. He hadn’t even remembered falling asleep and his body feels stiff and cramped from being pushed in from both his right side and down by his feet. He tries to struggle, to fight against it, only stopping when he sees Doyle propped up beside him on an elbow, staring down at him, and he realizes it’s _his_ hand that’s covering Houdini’s mouth. Doyle shushes him, leans closer, whispering: 

“There’s someone out there.” Doyle looks away, towards the outer room and Houdini follows, rises as slowly and quietly as he can on his own elbows, but only sees Adelaide’s back as she positions herself up on her knees, peering out into the large space ahead of them. Houdini pushes Doyle’s hand away from his face, wipes away sweat and the taste of salt and sits up straighter, bending his legs cautiously, maneuvering himself so he can crawl closer to where Adelaide is balanced.

“What is it?” He whispers but she puts her hand up, waves it where she thinks his voice is coming from and Houdini moves away from here, back to where Doyle was still mostly lounging. He glances at Doyle, tries to ask without speaking, but he just shakes his head in return. Houdini isn’t sure at first what alerted either of them to the fact that they weren’t alone but then he hears it: footsteps, muted but still audible against the metallic floor. It sounds like whoever (or whatever) it is is just walking, as if they don’t know the three of them are even there or if they did and was simply taunting them.

Adelaide gets up wordlessly and Houdini climbs over Doyle and then grabs at his jacket, pulling him to his feet alongside him and they follow her only a few steps behind.

“It’s an AI,” Adelaide says and she’s right; one of the Security AIs has found it’s way through the broken glass door and was currently walking in near perfect circles in the center of the room. It’s undressed, it’s milky white body scorched in places, it’s right arm hanging limp and useless but, otherwise, it seems unharmed.

“How’d it get in here?” Doyle asks, gives Houdini a look of exasperation when he raises an eyebrow at him. “You know what I mean.”

“Could have been on one of the floors we couldn’t get access to. No clue what it’s doing up here, though. It seems lost,” Adelaide says, steps back to give it more room, crossing her arms over her chest.

“There’s one way to find out,” Houdini says and walks away from Doyle to plant himself directly in the AIs path. For a second he thinks that it’s not going to stop, that it’ll keeping going, try to walk around or possibly over him, but after bumping into him twice, it freezes. It’s eyes are gaping black holes instead of the vaguely human look that had been built into their bald, domed heads and it makes the AI look as if it were merely a cavernous shell instead of a machine crammed with wires and hardware. “Hey, buddy,” Houdini says, “What’re you doing?”

It happens so fast that Houdini barely has time to blink. The AI’s good arm lifts and slams it’s metal hand into the side of his head, swatting him away like a nuisance bug and Houdini topples sideways, colliding with the large desk, the edge pressing painfully into his side. Doyle is at his side in an instant, a hand on his shoulder, the other on the hand that Houdini is holding to his head, attempting to move it to check where he had been hit and then Adelaide is there, too, but she’s staring at the AI, putting herself between Houdini and the machine. It stands, arm still raised, motionless, and then it opens it mouth.

The same noise that they had heard on the message—the same one that had nearly deafened them in the hallway before—comes screaming up from somewhere inside the AI. Houdini’s head is already swimming and this isn’t helping. Nobody moves until, finally, Adelaide storms off towards the small table and comes back with one of the chairs clutched in her hands. She swings with as much force as she can manage, slamming the piece of furniture into the AI, hits it again, and again only stopping when the AI was on the floor, it’s head backwards and fizzling. She throws the chair down, finished, and wipes her hair back from her forehead, taking a moment to catch her breath.

“How is he?” Adelaide asks Doyle, who looks somewhere between concerned and impressed by what he had just witnessed.

“ _He_ ,” Houdini says, wobbling slightly as he tries to straighten his back, “is fine.”

“I’ve seen an AI slap someone so hard that it’s broken their jaw,” Adelaide says. “You're lucky. It must not have been at full power.”

“You should sit,” Doyle tells him, holds on to his elbow and attempts to lead him towards a chair or the bed but Houdini moves out of his grip.

“I’m fine. I just need a minute.”

“So take a minute,” Doyle says. “But do it while sitting down.”

“Unbelievable. I said I’m fine. See,” Houdini says, pushing them out of the way to take a few steps forward. “I’m fi—” The room tilts, shifts like the entire ship had just slipped off-kilter a few inches and he sways, stumbles slightly. He manages to catch himself but there are hands on him anyway and he gives in, allows them to guide him towards the bed, where he sits down carefully, squeezing his eyelids shut to battle the sea-sickness-like feeling in his stomach. He hears a chair being dragged along the floor, and opens his eyes to see Doyle seated in front of him, arms resting on his thighs, a finger straight in the air, parallel to Houdini’s nose. “You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” Doyle says, moves his finger just enough to get Houdini to focus on it. “I need you to follow my finger.” He moves it, slowly back and forth, but Houdini doesn’t comply, stares at the man just past the floating digit and Doyle stops, lowering his arm with a heavy sigh. “Would you please cooperate with me?”

“Fine.” Doyle resumes his movements, Houdini doing as he says, and then swats him away when he can’t take it anymore. “Happy?”

“No." Another sigh. "But I highly doubt you have a concussion. I think it just surprised you, jarred your brain a little. You’ll live.”

“Thank God for that,” Houdini says, watches as Doyle prepares to say something else, an odd, unplaceable look suddenly in his eye but he’s cut off by the sound of Adelaide banging down the AI’s head onto the nearby table.

“It’s brain is gone,” she says, as if that was supposed to mean something to them. She flips the head over, allows them look into it’s neck and, indeed, the inside of it’s head is completely hollow.

“How the hell does an AI work without a brain?” Houdini asks.

“That,” Adelaide says, putting the head back down and turning the face away from them, “I cannot say. My—” She swallows, hesitates. “My husband would be able to explain it. But he’s… well, he’s not here.” She clears her throat, a look of heartbreak flittering briefly across her face and she drums her fingers awkwardly on the top of the detached head.

“The noise it made,” Doyle says. “Third time we’ve heard that today. Something’s trying to talk to us.”

“Come on,” Houdini says, “It’s probably just—”

“A coincidence?” Doyle finishes for him. “I thought you didn’t believe in those.” Houdini clamps his mouth shut, narrowing his eyes at Doyle and then looks to the broken machine, his head only now starting to throb.

 

....

 

Houdini and Adelaide sit on the floor, Doyle in a chair, and they form a small circle around the pieces of the AI. Adelaide had re-purposed a few kitchen utensils to use as tools to pick through the remains, hoping to find something that might tell them what had happened, but when they crack open the AI’s chest, they recoil, the hardware and mechanics burnt and steaming, splatters of black sludge beading and sliding inside the pale casing.

“That’s the same stuff I found leaking from the pipes,” Doyle remarks and Adelaide crawls over to her bag, draws it over to their circle by the strap and digs around inside, pulling out the pill bottle that had held their sample only to find a perfect hole in the bottom, as if the liquid had eaten it’s way out through the plastic.

“What _is_ this stuff?” Adelaide asks, opens the bag wider, pushes items out of the way and then sticks her hand inside, finger waggling through a hole in the corner. She takes a new pill bottle, empties the contents and carefully scoops some of the liquid from inside the AI into it, tightening the cap. She leans over on the balls of her feet, placing it on the desk and watches it carefully. “It’s not doing anything.”

“Maybe it only works when it knows we’re not looking at it,” Houdini suggests sarcastically, but nobody calls him out on it or contradicts him and he worries that they may have taken him seriously.

“Whatever it is,” Adelaide says, “It seems to be getting everywhere. It’s in the water pipes, it’s in the AIs…”

“I’d hardly say that’s _everywhere_ ,” Houdini says. “And we’re not going to know that for a fact unless we start tearing this ship apart with our bare hands.”

“No,” Doyle says unexpectedly and, despite only knowing him for a few hours, the way he says it sounds so unlike him, his tone somehow simultaneously flat and sing-song, that it throws Houdini (and Adelaide as well, by the look on her face) off.

“What?” Houdini asks and Doyle turns, looks at them, confused.

“Yes?”

“You just—” Houdini starts, pauses. “You, uh. You feeling okay?”

“Yes,” Doyle laughs, stutters, coughs, offering them only those two one-syllable words as if that was suddenly all he knew how how to say.

“Are you sure?” Adelaide asks, brow furrowing when Doyle says:

“No.”

“No? What do you mean?” She asks slowly, glances at Houdini.

“No,” Doyle repeats, not answering her question. He stands but the movement is clumsy, as if the bones in his legs were weak. “Not… that.” The words don’t make sense and he still sounds strange, as if his entire brain had somehow shut down and was scrambling to figure out a way to communicate. He says nothing else for almost ten seconds and then blinks once, twice, three times before giving his head a quick shake and peering first around the room and then at himself. “Why am I--?” Adelaide and Houdini share a look before they both rise to their feet as well, and Houdini approaches Doyle cautiously, hands out as if coming upon a potentially dangerous animal.

“You don’t remember any of that?” Houdini asks.

“Any of what?” Doyle frowns. “Why are you looking at me like that? You look like you’re afraid I’m going to snap your necks.”

“Doyle, your nose,” Adelaide says suddenly. “It’s bleeding.” Both Houdini and Doyle look to see that Doyle’s nose is indeed leaking but when Doyle dabs at it with his fingers and pulls them back to stare at them, Houdini can see his jaw tighten. When he notices the same thing that Doyle had, he feels his stomach drop.

“That’s not blood,” Houdini says. It’s not quite thick enough, the consistency too oily, the color pitch black.

“What—?” Adelaide quickly produces a few pieces of gauze from the duffel bag on the floor and hands it to Doyle, who presses it to his nose, holds it there and then brings it back, staring at the dark, blotchy stains. He turns to look at the bottle Adelaide had placed on the desk and back at the cloth, which he holds to his nose once again, the liquid still oozing out.

The head, left on the table like some morbid centerpiece, starts to scream.

The body parts left on the floor begin to jump and shake like they were experiencing a violent seizure.

“We have to get out of here,” Adelaide says, voice rising to combat the noise which had a way of consuming the entire room.

“Where?” Houdini asks.

“Somewhere else!” Adelaide yells at him, her voice firm but slightly panicked and she grabs the two men, fingers pulling the sleeves of their jackets and she makes a run for it, dragging them behind her as she moved. Through the broken glass door, around a corner, just in time to see another naked AI with blank eyes walking straight towards them. “Oh,” she says, stumbles backwards, nearly sends Houdini and Doyle toppling over. When it sees them—if it really even _sees_ them at all, Houdini thinks—it stops, arm rising, fingers curling until there’s only the index finger pointing in their direction.

The three of them move as if they’re one person, creeping slowly past the AI, making sure not to turn their backs on it, but it doesn’t acknowledge them any further and they walk backwards until they round a corner and none of them could see it any longer.

“What the _fuck_ was that?” Houdini asks. “What the hell is— What the _hell_ is going on here?” Houdini’s not sure what he’s more angry about, he realizes: that all of this is happening in the first place or that he already no longer feels like he can scrounge up a logical explanation for what any of this might be, despite the fact that his brain is shouting at him that there has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. All he can come up with, though, are a series of apparently random moments all colliding with the _Ark Royal_ at once, which would only prove to pulverize his disbelief in coincidences and anything else he could suggest was just as unlikely as what Doyle had been alluding to the past few hours. Houdini spent years of his life convincing people that he was magic, leaving them wondering how he did it, observing their bewildered faces as they sat in the audience, all the while knowing the truth about everything he was doing, but now that he was on the other end of it himself, lost to what was happening while some outside force held all the answers just out of reach, he decides he doesn’t enjoy it very much.

There’s a distant uneven _thunk, thunk, thunk_ of something hitting the floor and they spin around, watch as the AI they had left in pieces is now coming around the same corner they just turned down. It hops, stumbles towards them, the body malformed, an arm where the leg should have been, powerful leg jammed into a shoulder, the head on backwards.

“Christ,” Doyle breathes out.

“Come on,” Adelaide says, the AI now only a foot or two away, gestures towards an open door just a little ways down the hall, the ladder glinting at them, practically beckoning the trio to hurry, to use it because it’s not like they have any other real option. Houdini is the last to jump on and, when his head dips just past the metal platform, he stops, looks up at the sound of something following, sees the mangled AI lurching after them on to the platform, hesitating as it assess the situation before deciding to rush ahead and launch itself forward. It hits the ladder with a rattling _clang_ , bounces and starts to fall sideways, it’s one working arm making a fruitless attempt at grabbing on to at least one of the bodies it passes as it plummets. Houdini hears it colliding into multiple platforms on the way down and then, after a minute, there’s silence.

They exit wordlessly onto the floor just below them and find themselves wandering into a large cafeteria, two rows of long tables stretched across the oddly rectangular length of the room, the walls lined with refrigerators, broken vending machines and a burbling meal dispenser. Houdini climbs on one of the tables, sitting down, crossing his legs because there’s nobody there to say he can’t and Doyle squeezes himself on to the bench attached to the table. Adelaide remains on her feet, arms stiff at her sides, her fingers curled into half-fists.

“You should clean yourself up,” Houdini says to Doyle, who bends his neck to grimace at his slightly blurred reflection in the table’s surface. He hadn’t been able to staunch the leakage of the oily black substance as they climbed and it had made a mess of the lower half of his face. There’s a container of paper napkins a bit further down the table and Houdini leans sideways, reaches over to push it closer to Doyle, who begins ripping them out and scrubbing at himself even though it doesn’t seem to be doing much help.

“Here,” Adelaide says, puts a warm plastic bottle of water from the broken fridge by his elbow and he twists off the cap, soaks a clean napkin, uses the holder as a mirror.

“So, uh,” Houdini starts, “Are we going to just sit here or are we going talk about it?”

“About what?” Doyle snaps at him, pauses in cleaning his face. “About how the suddenly appearing AIs seem to be trying to possibly kill us or the fact that the same sludge that we found in the water pipes seems to be leaking out of my nose?”

“Both,” Houdini says.

“Something has to be controlling them,” Adelaide says, referring to the AIs, temporarily avoiding the topic of what was currently happening to Doyle. “They can’t operate without a brain. It’d be like taking the hard-drive out of a computer and expecting it to still work properly. It’s impossible. But when we opened that one up, all that was inside was that… that…” She searches for a word, her hand rotating in the air as she tried to come up with one the fit.

“Sludge,” Doyle offers.

“Sludge,” Adelaide repeats. “It was filled with sludge.”

“Hold on,” Houdini holds a hand up, letting out a laugh of disbelief. “So what you’re saying is that some black sludge is somehow _controlling_ an AI?” He asks, pauses to look back and forth between Adelaide and Doyle. “How? I mean, look at it. It’s… liquid.”

“Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis,” Doyle says without looking at them, stops when he notices that neither of them appear to understand what he just said. “Zombie fungus. The spores infect ants while they’re foraging. Simply put: it hijacks their bodies. Tampers with their central nervous system, forces them to find a leaf, clamp down and then… well.”

“Then...?” Adelaide asks, but Houdini feels like he already knows what Doyle is going to say and so does she.

“Kills it,” Doyle says, his voice wavering. “That—or something like it—is what’s inside the AIs. What…” He swallows. “What’s inside me.” He goes back to cleaning his face as if he’s unsure of what else he could be doing and Houdini doesn’t miss the way that his hands are now suddenly quaking slightly.

“Come on,” Houdini says. “We don’t know that for sure.” But, deep down, he knows it’s just a stupidly comforting lie. They were all present when Doyle started to speak and didn’t sound like himself, when he came back and couldn’t remember what he’d said.

“It’s most likely the only thing we _do_ know for sure,” Doyle counters.

“Okay,” Houdini says, slides off the table to sit down beside Doyle and Doyle pauses in what he’s doing once more to stare at him. “Say you’re right. Say you _are_ filled up with some brain-controlling sludge that’ll turn you into a zombie or eat you from the inside or whatever you said about that fungus.”

“You’re such a comfort,” Doyle remarks, tries to resume his cleaning but Houdini grabs his wrist, makes him stop, brings Doyle’s attention back to himself.

“You’re a doctor. You write _detective_ novels, for Christ's sake,” Houdini reminds him. “You’re telling me you’re not even going to _try_ and figure this out? Besides, you’ve got both me and Adelaide here. We barely know each other, sure, but I’d like to think we’ve got enough combined brainpower to find a solution here.” He glances to Adelaide and she nods, just once.

“Absolutely,” she says, walks over to sit on Doyle’s other side. “We’ve made it this far, haven’t we? No point in giving up now. We’ve got some of the pieces, now we have to start putting the puzzle together.” Doyle looks back and forth between the two of them and drops his arm to the table, sighing slowly.

“You’re right.”

“Of course we are,” Houdini says, grinning, slapping Doyle hard on the back to ease the somewhat uncomfortable tension. “So, where do we start?”

 

 ....

 

Houdini is back on top of the table, Doyle and Adelaide in front of him on the bench seat, the table written on for lack of any other useful flat surface, words scrawled with an actual permanent marker (Houdini had thought those were long since extinct, a product of a bygone time when not everybody had a tablet and still used paper to write on, but Adelaide had managed to find one hidden underneath a cabinet stacked with dishware, covered with dust and slightly dry. Houdini figured that somebody out there still made them, produced for the types that liked to douse themselves in the tired scent of nostalgia). 

“It must be able to think,” Doyle is saying, staring at the disappointingly short list they had managed to cobble together of what they figured they knew for certain about what they were dealing with. “At least somehow. AIs don’t have the same sort of brains that humans do but the sludge was able to make them walk, to direct them, to put themselves back together.”

“It talked through you,” Houdini says. Doyle coughs. “It’s gotta have some idea what it’s doing.”

“It seemed to have started to eat through the water pipes,” Adelaide says, changing the subject slightly, as none of them were still quite prepared to completely tackle that particular part of it yet. “It got through the empty bottle, through the bag. It melted the insides of the AIs. Some sort of acid, maybe?” Doyle grimaces, shakes his head, taps the pen on the table.

“I’d be coughing up blood if that were true. I’d have been dead hours ago.”

“Maybe all that other stuff isn’t the right environment. Like bacteria that can only exist in humid conditions,” Houdini says and Doyle looks up at him, eyes narrowed with an expression almost akin to disbelief. “What? I read.”

“You’re suggesting,” Doyle says slowly, “That this sludge can only live inside something else already living. Something with flesh, with organs. Something...”

“...Warm,” Adelaide finishes for him, and the thought is disturbing enough for all of them to fall into a distressed silence. “The AIs are warm,” she says eventually. “All machines are to some extent. But they aren’t alive. Not really. Not the way humans are. It can still make the AIs work, just not very well.”

“If that’s the case,” Doyle says after mulling over what was said for a few seconds, “There are only two ways I can see to try and get it out of me. We’d have to bring my body temperature down extremely low, hope we can change the environment, force it to leave.” He hesitates, his grip on the marker tightening, knuckles white.

“What’s the other option?” Houdini asks. Adelaide crosses her arms and looks at a spot on the wall just behind her, her jaw clenching.

“We’d have to kill him.”

 

....

 

“No!” Houdini yells, jabs his finger aggressively in Doyle’s direction. They were all on their feet, had been arguing about it for almost fifteen minutes and nobody was getting anywhere. “Absolutely not. I refuse to accept that _murder_ is our Plan B here!” 

“I can assure you, I very much would rather not have to be _killed_ to fix this problem but, by all means,” Doyle retorts, “If you can come up with any other suggestions, I’m all ears!”

“Enough!” Adelaide shouts from where she’s standing, having remained—up until that point—mostly silent, allowing them to verbally battle it out between themselves. They both immediately cease talking over one another, halt mid-sentence and turn to face her. Houdini notices for the first time how truly exhausted she looks. “We’re not going to solve anything by yelling at one another! I understand, Houdini. The thought of having to— I don’t retain any sort of enjoyment out of thinking about it either. But… Well, it might not have to be Plan B, but eventually we’re going to run out of options and that… that _will_ be our last one.” Houdini frowns, drops his arms to his sides and looks at Doyle, who says nothing.

“I’m not going to do it. If we have to— I won’t be the one to pull the trigger.” Houdini sits down heavily, rubs his hands over his face, winces when his fingers push too hard into the bruise from where the AI had hit him and he watches out of the corner of his eye as Doyle lowers himself slowly beside him, hands limp in his lap.

“If it does come to that,” Doyle says softly, staring at a spot on the floor, “And you make it out of here… I want you to find my children. Their names are Mary and Kingsley. I want you to tell them—”

“Stop,” Houdini says.

“Harry…” Doyle starts, and Houdini can feel Doyle staring at him now but he refuses to turn his head and stare back.

“No. Stop talking.”

“Harry. Please, just tell them—”

“Whatever it is, you can tell them yourself,” Houdini snaps. “Just… stop.” Doyle complies, gazes down at the tops of his hands that were still resting between his thighs. Houdini wants to shake him, to shout at him that they’ve all got someone waiting for them on Earth, wondering where they are. They all have things they wish they could say to people they care about and spending time coming up with platitudes to be delivered from strangers in case they didn’t make it wasn’t going to make anything any better for them but, instead, he says none of it, his teeth pressed tightly together.

“You said we could try to freeze it out of you,” Adelaide says after an extended silence.

“Uh, yes. Right,” Doyle says, rubs his chin, exhales slowly and then coughs. He’s been doing that a lot more recently, Houdini notices. At first he thought it had just been a nervous tick but now he wasn’t so sure. He decides not to mention it. “If it does indeed prefer a warm environment like we hypothesized, then bringing my body temperature down may give it no choice but to evacuate.”

“How would we do that?” She asks.

“I don’t know. There’s a machine that we used in the hospital that helps in cooling down patients with extraordinarily high fevers. It’s highly unlikely they’d have one on here, though. An ice bath would be another option if we were able to even find enough ice on board. Or any at all.”

“The rooms,” Houdini says. “They have their own personal temperature controls. Said so in the brochure. We stuff him in somebody’s empty room, turn down the heat and see what happens.” It’s a solid strategy, Houdini thinks, and the others seem to agree.

“It seems we've reached the fourth step, then, in the Scientific Method:” Doyle says, “Conducting the experiment.”

 

....

 

They have to go down three more floors until they finally find where the hotel rooms begin and they briefly separate, trying different doors until Houdini discovers one that isn’t completely broken, that will shut securely enough that outside air wouldn’t be able to seep in and Adelaide finds a torn bedspread on the floor to stuff under the crack in the bottom of the door.

“Alright,” Doyle says, removing his jacket, handing it Adelaide and beginning to roll his sleeves up to the elbows, “I’ll turn the temperature down a few notches below zero degrees celsius. Check on me after thirty minutes. That should be enough time.”

“Nobody has a watch,” Houdini points out.

“Ah. Then just… wait awhile before opening the door.” He walks into the room and Houdini follows without hesitation. “What are you doing?” Doyle asks, turning to look at him, perplexed.

“Coming with you,” Houdini says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world and Doyle glances at Adelaide who shrugs. She had nothing to do with this. “Somebody should keep an eye on you. I can stop you from falling asleep. That’s what happens with hypothermia, right? You just nod off and that’s it. Would kinda ruin the experiment if you’re dead, wouldn’t it? The whole point of this is so it _doesn’t_ have to come to that. Because it won’t. This has to work and I’m going to make sure it does.”

“You won’t be able to do much of anything if we’re _both_ freezing,” Doyle points out and Houdini steps back towards Adelaide, takes Doyle’s discarded jacket from her hands and puts it on, layering it on top of the one he was already wearing. “There. Another jacket.” He then reaches over and slides the undisturbed comforter off of the room’s bed, wrapping it around his shoulders. “And I’ve got a blanket.” He smiles. “Good to go.” Doyle looks to Adelaide again, silently pleading with her to help, to tell Houdini that this is a terrible idea but deflates when she sides with Houdini instead.

“I don’t love the idea,” she says, “But I do feel a bit better about knowing you won’t be in there alone. I’ll stay out here to let you out and make sure nothing tries to get in.”

“Fine,” Doyle says, giving up. Houdini waves at Adelaide as she shuts the door and then he settles down on the floor, watching as Doyle marches over to the small screen in the wall and swipes his fingers down, the number falling from a comfortable twenty degrees to minus-six.

Doyle sits down across from Houdini in a vacant chair and they start to wait. It doesn’t take long for them to start to feel it and, after only a couple of minutes, Doyle is already starting to shiver and Houdini pulls the blanket closer around himself. 

“You never told me where your wife was,” Houdini says. “Why they’re stuck down there with a nanny machine.” Doyle gives him a look as if he honestly couldn’t believe that this was what Houdini wanted to talk about while trapped in a slowly freezing room but then he exhales heavily, looks down at the floor.

“She’s in a coma,” he says. “She was working at Ortov-Chen Technologies during the massive AIs malfunction.”

“Oh,” Houdini says, not expecting to hear that. Adelaide had mentioned the company name briefly earlier in her disparaging remark about why the big bosses upstairs made sure to hire a few human officers every now and then, although she had described it as the AIs ‘turning on them’ which wasn’t exactly true—at least, it wasn’t what everybody had been told. Five years ago, Ortov-Chen Technologies came into the public eye after announcing that they were building plans to mass produce nurse AIs to be integrated into hospitals all over the world, AIs that would be able to dispense pills, to take care of patients and, perhaps even diagnose and treat minor injuries. There had been outrage, mostly from the working-class who thought they were finally being replaced like they had been warned about for years, something which Ortov-Chen assured wasn’t their intention but nobody really believed.

Nothing came of it right away, though, and Ortov-Chen said in a later follow-up that it could take up to ten years before they would be able to introduce the prototypes into a few wealthier hospitals for testing. People stopped talking about it. And then a year ago, the company slammed into the news again but, this time, it was nothing good: an AI they had been testing had caught a nasty virus (a virus still of unknown origin, although plenty of hackers liked to claim it had been them) and, because every AI ran on the same program, because they were all built with the same code buried on a room full of servers, it was only a short amount of time before the rest of them caught it, too. The AIs rampaged. Tech specialists would later come to compare it to a dog with rabies: disoriented, erratic and aggressive. _“If they could foam at the mouth,” one engineer had said, “they probably would have.”_

When all was said and done, ten people had died, many more were grievously injured, and the facility was destroyed. Ortov-Chen Technologies was still fighting in court to this day and there were predictions that the CEO’s grandchildren would be there in their old age, still trying to make things right.

“How did it happen? I mean, what exactly—” He stopped himself, felt like an asshole for asking the minute it left his mouth.

“You’d think it was from one of the AIs attacking, wouldn’t you?” Doyle chuckles sadly, his teeth chattering. “She fell down a flight of stairs while running away. Hit her head. One of the AIs actually tried to help her.”

“How do you know?”

“She didn’t— It wasn’t immediate. I got to talk to her for awhile before…” He trails off, clears his throat. “One of the other employees ran into her in his panic and she lost her balance. The man just kept going, didn’t go back to see if she was okay. To help her. She told me she remembered an AI, one she had been working with earlier that week, stopping to take care of her. It carried her outside. If it hadn’t, she could have died. It saved her life but her head injury was too severe, there were complications. There was nothing anyone could do.” Doyle turns to look towards the wall, away from Houdini and coughs. Houdini doesn’t know if it’s because of his current condition or if he’s trying to cover up the fact that his eyes were getting wet.

“What happened to it?” Houdini asks, referring to the AI.

“Reprogramed,” Doyle says. “It’s taking care of my kids now.”

“Wow,” Houdini says. “How’d you swing that? I thought they decommissioned all the AIs from the facility.”

“Special case, I suppose,” Doyle says, hugging his arms around himself, his breath now visible when he spoke.

 

....

 

“If it makes you feel any better,” Houdini says a little while later, “I can’t feel my face anymore.”

“Y-yes, tha-thank you,” Doyle replies. “Th-that d-d-does make me feel s-so mu-much better.”

“Really?”

“No!” Doyle looks awful: his shaking has gotten worse, his hands stiff as he tries to make himself smaller in an attempt to hold on to some kind of warmth.

“I don’t think this is working,” Houdini reluctantly admits. “We need to get you out of here.”

“Ju-just a f-f-few more m-minutes,” Doyle protests.

“You said that a few minutes ago. Nothing’s changed. Maybe you were wrong.”

“It sh-should have w-worked. It was a… a s-solid theory,” Doyle says.

“Yeah,” Houdini says, “And you’re going to be solid, too, if I don’t get you out of here.” He bends his sore legs underneath him, puts a hand on the floor, his other still securely holding the blanket around his shoulders and he’s about to stand when he notices that Doyle has stopped moving, an expression of confusion furrowing his brow. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure…” He says, tilting his head just as his body jolts as if he had been hit with a minor zap of electricity.

“Whoa, what— Is that supposed to be—?” Houdini asks, watches as it happens again and then a third time before the next convulsion sends Doyle falling forward out of his chair in a jumble of limbs, the side of his face pressed flat against the floor. “Doyle!” Houdini crawls over, closing the gap between them, puts a hand carefully on his back, tries to talk to him when suddenly Doyle’s arms begin flailing, the rest of his body immobile. Houdini moves back but he isn’t quick enough and the hands find him, curled fingers grasping around his neck. Finally, the rest of Doyle’s body follows, sitting up as if whatever was wearing his skin was far too small to fit inside him.

Houdini grabs hold of Doyle’s wrists, fights to remove his hands but the grip is too tight. Doyle is rising to his feet and Houdini has no choice but to move with him, the blanket falling off his body, his feet leaving the floor. He kicks at Doyle, legs swinging, thrashing wildly and he manages to nail him right in the kneecap. It’s enough of a distraction that Doyle loosens his fingers and Houdini slips free from his grasp. He lunges for the door—it’s not far, it’s barely a few feet away—but feels a hand snatch the back of the top layer jacket. He slips, slams his palm against the door, starts to fall but catches himself with his hands and he grimaces as shock of pain travel up his right arm.

“Houdini?” He hears Adelaide call out from the other side. “Is everything alright in there?”

Houdini shouts at her to open the door. Doyle has him by the ankle now, is yanking him backwards and Houdini lands hard on his stomach, tries to grab hold of something to pull himself forward, to get away but then the door is bursting open and Adelaide stands there, takes a moment to examine the situation and then rushes in, delivering a swift blow to Doyle’s temple, stunning him, and then grabs at Houdini, helping him out into the hall.

They slam the door closed again and Adelaide locks it, the two of them scrambling back,moving as far away from the door as they could manage, when they hear the sickening sound of Doyle’s body colliding repeatedly into the door from inside the room. He says something, repeats it, but the words are garbled or perhaps they’re entirely meaningless. The noise seems to drag on for hours—it was actually less than a minute, Houdini was counting the seconds—but then, after one last hit, it suddenly stops.

“Houdini,” Doyle finally says, voice muffled. “Adelaide. It’s okay now. It’s me. Please…” He pauses. “Please let me out.” Houdini doesn’t move though, and neither does Adelaide. “It’s alright,” he tries, “I promise.” Adelaide starts to walk forward but Houdini reaches out, catches her arm, holding her still and she looks back at him, frowning.

“What are you doing?” He asks her, whispering.

“If he’s lying, we’ll just wrestle him back in the room. I think the two of us can take him.” She tugs her arm and he lets her go, makes sure to stay right behind her and doesn’t mention that he’d be fighting one-handed if it actually came to that. The lock clicks, the door slides easily open and Doyle stands in the doorway for a moment before coming out. Adelaide and Houdini both take a couple steps back, away from him, and a pained expression shifts onto his face.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, tries to move towards them again and Adelaide stands her ground but Houdini can’t stop himself from taking another step away. “Harry…” Doyle says, sounds positively wounded. Adelaide eyes him guardedly before moving to the side to allow them more room to talk, apparently deciding there was no clear danger anymore. “Are you hurt?”

“Yeah,” Houdini admits, the angry, vindictive part of him wanting to rub it in Doyle’s face, to make him feel as bad as possible but he knows also—sternly reminds himself in a voice that sounds a lot like his mother—that it wasn’t really Doyle’s fault. It wasn’t his fault that some alien sludge decided to make a home inside of him. _It wasn’t his fault_. He puts his left hand to his throat, absently touches where Doyle’s had been only minutes before but it doesn’t feel any different. His other arm is bent slightly, resting just above his stomach and Doyle stares at it briefly before looking back up at Houdini’s face and holding out his own hands.

“May I?”

Houdini wants to say no, wants to tell him to stop trying to be nice, that it wasn’t going to change the fact that both he and Adelaide couldn’t trust him anymore, if they ever could at all, but he feels himself nodding instead, muscles tense when Doyle approaches him. Doyle takes Houdini’s hand gently into his own, carefully moves his fingers, turns the hand palm-up, twists his arm slightly this way and that to examine the wrist and Houdini winces. He’s been in worse pain before, injured himself worse than this just from rehearsing stunts, liked to think that he had a high tolerance for any sort of physical agony. He _liked_ to think he did, but he just tells people that because if he got proper treatment for every injury he sustained in his lifetime, he’d be putting on shows only once or twice a year. He might not have even started putting shows on at all.

“Doesn’t appear to be broken,” Doyle says, attempts a weak, comforting smile. “Most likely just sprained. Either way, best not to move it around too much for awhile.”

“Great. Thanks,” Houdini says dismissively, uses the silence his words caused to think, replays what happened, the stilted conversation that occurred afterwards and he puts a pinpoint on something specific that he hadn’t picked up on at first. “‘It’s me now’, you said.”

“Yes,” Doyle replies.

“So you knew? You knew when you weren’t yourself just then?”

“Yes,” Doyle repeats, shame washing over his voice. “It wasn’t like the last time, when I felt like I had blacked out. I was— I was aware. I knew what my body was— I couldn’t control it.” His voice is soft and Houdini wonders if Doyle realizes that he’s still holding on to his injured hand. “I tried.”

“We believe you,” Adelaide says, having listened in on the exchange, says it before Houdini could keep badgering him. “Obviously this cold experiment didn’t work out. We’ll just have to think of something else.” Doyle’s gazing somewhere off in the distance, just over Adelaide’s head and Houdini looks up at him, mouth downturned.

“What is it?”

“I’m just a little tired,” Doyle says and then promptly passes out.

 

....

 

“Thanks for the rescue in there, by the way,” Houdini says while the two of them sit side-by-side, backs leaning against the wall while they wait for Doyle to (hopefully) wake up.

“Any time,” Adelaide says.

“I’m usually a better fighter than that,” Houdini tells her. “But I was cold. And he caught me off guard.”

“Right,” Adelaide says, shaking her head and laughing. “Of course.”

“Do you really believe him?” Houdini asks, changing the subject.

“What? That he knew what was going on?” Adelaide inquires and Houdini shrugs. “Or do you mean that you don’t believe it’s still really him?”

“I don’t know,” Houdini admits. “If this… this thing is really as intelligent as you and Doyle say it is, then what’s to stop it from just putting on a show for us. Make us think that it’s fighting for control in there but… maybe he hasn’t been himself this entire time.”

“You’re being paranoid,” Adelaide says.

“Maybe he should be,” Doyle says and they both turn to look at him as he rolls over to face them. “I feel like myself. That I’m _me_. But that could simply be what it wants us all to believe.”

“You’re both being ridiculous,” Adelaide says. “We’re upset, on edge. It makes it difficult to think clearly. Look, we’ll go back to the cafeteria, have some water, try to find something to eat and then decide what to do next.” She stands up, hands on her hips, speaks with authority, making it clear that she wasn’t in the mood for an argument.

 

....

 

Doyle sequesters himself away from the other two, sits at the far end of the long table, pressed against the wall, taking careful sips of his drink. Houdini watches him, brushes his hand flat against the scrawled writing on the table’s surface and then gets up, walks over to sit across from him while Adelaide is busy searching through every drawer and cabinet in the room, making a small pile of whatever edible she could find.

“You shouldn’t be sitting here,” Doyle says, turning away from him.

“Why not?”

“I think it’s getting worse,” Doyle says. “I don’t want to hurt you again. Or Adelaide.”

“It’s not—” Houdini starts, stops when Doyle turns back towards him and he can see that the black liquid is bleeding from his nose again. Houdini reaches for a napkin and extends it to Doyle, who accepts it reluctantly and holds it to his face. “We’ll figure this out.” Doyle slams his fist on the table, making Houdini jump, and then stares at it as if it had betrayed him before hiding it swiftly away in his lap. “We’ll figure it out quickly, then,” Houdini amends his statement.

Adelaide walks over, dumping an armful of mostly the same sort of energy bars that they had tried to eat earlier, along with a few packages of dried fruit and she’s about to comment on it before observing their expressions and the slowly soaking-through napkin that Doyle was pressing under his nose.

“Here,” Adelaide says, offering Doyle some of the fruit. “You should eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” Doyle says so Houdini snatches it from her instead, ripping the bag open with his teeth and starts chewing on what turns out to be pineapple. Adelaide subtly rolls her eyes, lowering herself down beside him and Houdini tilts the open bag in her direction, shaking it slightly until she dips her fingers inside and takes some of the food for herself. Houdini offers it to Doyle next, moving it closer and closer to his face the longer he ignores it until eventually Doyle reaches up and slaps it from his hand. Houdini pauses—can feel Adelaide holding her breath—and then shrugs, grabbing another packet from the hoard and resuming eating.

“He wants us to leave him alone,” Houdini says to Adelaide.

“Well, we’re definitely not doing that,” Adelaide replies.

“We’re not?” Houdini asks, over-acting far more than required.

“Of course not,” Adelaide says. “We’re a team, like it or not. We’re stuck.”

“A team, you say?”

“Alright!” Doyle cries out and they turn their heads simultaneously to look at him. “I get it! You’ve made your point. But if something goes wrong—”

“What was that you told me earlier?” Houdini asks Adelaide, interrupting him. “Ah, right. ‘I think the two of us can take him’. We can handle you. Besides, I’m ready for it now. Can’t catch me off guard again.”

“I’ll just punch you in the head,” Adelaide says, playing along. “Worked last time, didn’t it?”

“I hate the both of you,” Doyle says, taking a clean napkin from Houdini when he holds it out to him.

“Nah,” Houdini says. “No you don’t. Here,” he holds the package of food out towards him again. “Have some fruit.”

“I don’t _want_ your fruit,” Doyle says.

“You’ll regret saying that when all that’s left for you is those awful energy bars.”

“I’m beginning to regret an awful lot of things right now,” Doyle says. “What’s one more?” Houdini turns to Adelaide to bring her into the conversation but she’s looking towards the door, unnervingly motionless. He tries to ask her what’s wrong but she quiets them, holds her hand up and then lowering it. At first, Houdini doesn’t hear anything particularly out of the ordinary (and how horrible is that, Houdini thinks, that such deafening silence on a ship that had once been packed with people is now their new normal) but then both he and Doyle seem to catch it at the same time: a _ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk_ of ungainly feet approaching them from somewhere outside, down the hall.

Louder, louder, louder, as it gets closer and Houdini realizes they’ve trapped themselves, pushed together in the back of the room. From the sound of it, he expects an AI, but the one that appears, stopping dead still in the doorway is not the one he predicted they’d see: it’s the contorted one, the one with an arm where a leg should be, a leg flopping from its shoulder. They stand slowly but it doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge them as if it’s waiting for something. The paint is shorn off in patches, the metal body dented, the head somehow turned back the right way around but now caved in at the side and one of it’s eyes is missing, giving a clear look into the hollowness within.

It’s jaw slides open with a rasping noise, the hinges brittle and they brace themselves for more screaming, static and un-patterned clicking but instead it says:

“WHAT. ARE. YOU. DOING?” The words are stilted, unnatural, the tone completely flat, but vibrating as if whatever was actually talking to them was wrapped around the vocal box still stuffed somewhere in the AI’s neck. The question is raised with the final word but it’s spoken as if the voice is almost attempting to sing. None of them move and they barely breathe. Houdini’s mouth is dry and he clenches his teeth together, tastes the bit of fruit stuck in between them, a sweet burst of bitter sugar dripping down his throat when he swallows. “WHAT IS. THIS?”

“Are— Are you trying to talk to us?” Adelaide asks, doing her best to bury the slight quiver in her voice. She takes a cautious step forward and then another. Houdini’s body is yelling at him to stay where he is but his brain shuts it up, follows behind her, making sure not to break eye-contact with the machine in the doorway.

“SAY,” it says, and nothing more for a few seconds. “YES.”

“This is freaking me out more than the screaming was,” Houdini mutters to Adelaide, a hand on her shoulder. He feels Doyle finally shuffle over beside him.

“What do you want?” Doyle inquires. “What are you doing here?” The AI hesitates as if it’s processing what it had just been asked. It clicks a few times and then says:

“WHAT.” A pause. “WHAT DO YOU. WANT.” Another pause. “YOU ARE. HERE. WHAT ARE YOU. DOING HERE? WHAT ARE YOU.”

“Human,” Adelaide tells it. “We’re human.”

“MONSTER.” The AI replies.

“No,” Adelaide says, “We’re not mon—”

“MONSTER.” The AI interrupts. “YOU ARE? WE ARE.”

“Why the hell is it talking like that?” Houdini asks, keeps his voice low. It’s throwing their own words back at them, stringing together botched sentences as if someone had opened a bag of the entire human vocabulary to it and then told it to blindly choose only a hundred basic words and to try and communicate with them. He doesn’t get an answer other than a slow shake from Adelaide’s head and he watches as Doyle moves ahead of them, puts only a few feet between him and the AI.

“Where are you from?”

“WHERE ARE YOU. FROM,” it repeats, clicks. “OUT. THERE." 

“Outside the ship?” Doyle asks. “From space?”

“YES. WHERE. ARE YOU. FROM?”

“We’re from—” Doyle starts to say but Houdini cuts him off.

“Somewhere else,” he says and Doyle looks back at him, frowning. “Are you crazy?” Houdini hisses at him. “You’re really going to tell the sludge exactly where we live?”

“Fine,” Doyle says, turns back to the AI. “Not from here.”

“YOU ARE,” it says to Doyle suddenly after a brief moment of reticence. “ONE OF US.” Doyle freezes as if he had just stepped on a landmine and Houdini can see whatever color was left drain from his face. Houdini rushes forward, hands clenched into fists and gets as much into it’s face as he can, points threateningly as he talks.

“He’s _not_ ‘one of you’. He’s one of _us_.”

“ONE OF. US.” It echoes. “MONSTER.” Houdini raises his arm and then realizes that he can’t punch an AI, that it would have absolutely zero effect so he pushes it instead and its already unstable frame goes tipping backwards, hitting the floor with a clanging _thud_. 

“Houdini!” Adelaide admonishes from behind him but she doesn’t do anything to stop him, to pull him away.

“MONSTER,” the AI says again.

“No,” Houdini disagrees, standing over it, “ _You’re_ the monster. You attack our ship, you kill everybody but us, you… you…” He doesn’t know what word to use, what to call what it’s done to Doyle and settles on ‘infected’. “You _infected_  our friend.” (‘Friend’. It slips out without him thinking about it.) “And you’re calling _us_ the monsters?”

“STOP. STOP THAT,” it says from where it lays on the floor after it takes a minute to attempt to understand the angry sequence of words that Houdini had just hurled at it. “YOUR PEOPLE. NOT DEAD.”

“What?” Houdini asks, breathes the word out on an exhale. 

“What do you mean?” Adelaide asks. “What do you mean they’re not dead?” 

“NOT DEAD,” it says. “INSIDE. NOT DEAD.”

“Inside? They’re _inside_ the ship?” Adelaide is suddenly there, next to Houdini, crouching down beside the prone machine. “Where?” But the AI doesn’t respond. She asks it again, tries wording it differently, changing the subject but it’s stopped talking to them, it’s single eye staring up at the ceiling as if it was playing dead.

 

....

 

“They must be on one of the floors we couldn’t get to,” Adelaide says as they stand in a small circle on the other side of the room as if they were afraid the AI could hear them, all of them temporarily forgetting that the same sludge that tried to hold an inelegant discussion with them was also swimming around inside Doyle. The AI hadn’t moved since it ceased speaking to them, stayed where it was on the floor where Houdini had pushed it down, a weird sort of look on it’s smashed face as if it were currently contemplating all of its life’s choices up until that point and trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

“There were _hundreds_ of people,” Houdini says. “Where could it fit all of them?”

“The reception hall,” Adelaide says, eyes widening, “on the fifteenth floor." 

“It could be lying,” Houdini suggests.

“I don’t think it can,” Doyle says. “It can barely even talk.”

“Yeah,” Houdini says, “What was up with that?”

“I don’t know,” Doyle confesses. “I may have read a book or two at some point but it’s not exactly my—”

“Best guess, then,” Houdini says.

“Best guess?” Doyle frowns as he tries figure it out. “It’s… It’s learning. It understands the words it’s using. It’s capable of holding a conversation. But it seems as if it can only use words it’s heard before.”

“Where did it hear all of those? I mean, the basics like ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the little words, but something like ‘monster’? I don’t remember any of us saying that before.”

“We didn’t,” Adelaide says. “But the people it attacked when it got here might have. Think about it: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘What are you?’. ‘No.’ ‘Stop.’” She swallows, runs a hand through her messy hair. She told them to think about it but Houdini found it easier if he didn’t. Doyle makes a sudden sound of pain and he touches his forehead with his fingers, cringing. “What is it?”

“My head,” he says. “It just—”

“Doyle, your eyes,” Adelaide gasps, can’t help herself but recoil when he looks at them. The sludge is trailing down from his tear ducts now instead of his nose and Doyle reaches up to wipe at it, takes the napkin from Adelaide that she was using to help him clean it away. “We have to find them,” Adelaide says to Houdini. “We have to try. If we can find them, maybe we’ll get closer to an answer.”

There’s a large part of Houdini that doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to see what could be waiting for them, what they had missed, content to stay where they were and hope that the message to Earth finally breaks through and they can go home, let someone else deal with this impossible mess. But he knows that’s not really him. It’s his stupid, human fear talking instead. Houdini opens his mouth, looks to Doyle who’s trying to staunch the trickle of black down his face.

“Okay,” he says.

 

....

 

They walk over the AI, move towards the open door to where the ladder is but Adelaide stops just outside the platform, closing her eyes, fingers rubbing at her temples as she thinks.

“What’re you doing?” Houdini asks.

“The fifteenth floor,” Adelaide says, reminding herself more than the other two. “That was the floor that the _Royal_ sealed up after whatever this was burst through the bottom of the ship.”

“Shit,” Houdini says. “Right. But, I mean, the seal should be holding still, yeah? That should help. Those things are supposed to be tough.”

“Not as tough as you’d think,” Adelaide says, an edge of resentment in her voice as if speaking from personal experience. “Besides, just because it’s sealed doesn’t mean there aren’t cracks in the walls sucking out all of the breathable air in there.”

“That thing said our people weren’t dead,” Houdini says. “Without breathable air…”

“It said they weren’t dead,” Doyle interjects. “We have no idea what ‘not dead’ means to it.” He sounds worn out, his speech slightly thick, slurring around the edges as if he had just one too many drinks. He doesn’t react as if he notices but Houdini does and one quick glance at Adelaide shows that she does, too. “We don’t even know what it’s made of.”

“Fine,” Houdini concedes. “We still need to get down there, though.” Adelaide sighs and then brightens a little.

“The engineers had suits on board to wear if the outside of the ship needed repairs.”

“Great,” Houdini says, starts to head for the platform, stops when Adelaide follows with:

“Engineering was on the third floor. The third floor is gone.”

“Those were the only ones?” Houdini asks. Adelaide crosses her arms, drums her fingers on her elbow.

“George!” She declares without warning. “Stupid George.” Houdini’s brows pull together.

“Who’s George?”

“He was another Security Officer. He ‘borrowed’ a suit from Engineering a few days ago. Wanted to try it on, thought it made him look cool,” she says, sounding unimpressed. “I told him to put it back but he said that he ‘wasn’t a child’ and that I should ‘mind my own business’. It’s probably still stuffed under his bunk.”

 

 ....

 

Adelaide marches into a room on the floor where the human Security Officer’s were kept and it’s packed with rows of uniform bunk-beds pushed up against bare, beige walls. She drops to her hands and knees next to one somewhere in near the center where a helmet hangs on one of the supports that held the bed frame together and she makes a noise of combined relief and excitement, pulling out a bulky, scrunched-up suit and a heavy pair of boots.

 

 ....

 

They stop on the floor just above the fifteenth and Adelaide unfolds the suit, shaking it slightly. The material is thick and smooth like silicone but it’s the color of mud, strange lumps of what Houdini figures keeps it working jammed on the inside, a heavy square pack attached to it on the outside, straps folding over the shoulders like a permanent backpack. Metal rings pull around the arms and legs, the gloves clunky, a black fabric with what looked like large goosebumps spread across the palms and up the inside of the fingers.

“The pack on the back there takes care of the oxygen,” Adelaide explains, pointing to it. “It runs on a battery. Hopefully George didn’t use it up. And there’s a camera in the helmet which can be watched from… here,” she says, pulls a small device out of a holster in the waist of the suit. “That’s about as much as I know, unfortunately. They taught us the basics when we got this job, just in case of an emergency and we… well, we were the only ones left.” 

“Got it,” Houdini says, reaches for the suit, his fingertips only brushing it as Adelaide pulls it away from him.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m going to put the suit on, go down there,” Houdini says, tries to make a grab for it again but Adelaide just moves it farther away.

“I don’t think so,” she chuckles as she speaks, shaking her head.

“I’ll do it then,” Doyle says but Adelaide refuses him as well.

“You’re _definitely_ not going to do it,” she tells him.

“Adelaide…” Houdini starts but she shushes him, shuts him down.

“No! I’m in charge here.” Houdini barks out a laugh when she says it and she glares at him, jaw tensing as she clenches it.

“Since when?”

“I am still a Security Officer, which means that, technically, I am the highest ranking officer on board at this moment.”

“You’re pulling _rank_ on us?”

“Doyle is in no condition and you—” She starts, hesitates.

“Me, what?” Houdini asks.

“Forget it,” she says instead, smooths out the hardness in her voice, softens her face. “Let me do this. I want to do it. I have to. It was…” She sighs mournfully, closes her eyes as if preparing herself for what she was going to say next. “It was my job to take care of this ship. They expected Security—expected _me_ —to protect them if something went wrong and I failed. So yes, if it’ll convince you to let me put on this suit, I’m going to pull rank.” Houdini puts his hands up in mock surrender and then gestures for her to go ahead. “Thank you.”

She climbs inside the suit that was half a size too big for her frame and Doyle seals it closed, lets her use him as a crutch to keep herself steady as she slides her feet into the boots and he crouches down to tighten the buckles around the tops of her feet and her ankles. Houdini waits for him to finish before walking up to her and slowly lowering the helmet over her head, turning it counterclockwise until the clear visor is in the front and he hears it lock tightly closed on the metal ring around her neck. His sprained wrist throbs with the movement but he doesn’t give any indication that it was bothering him. What they were doing, he thinks, is far more important than any physical pain he might be feeling. He keeps his hands on the helmet for a moment when he finishes, holding either side of the glass dome and he stares at her almost eerily disembodied head against the opaque back-half of the helmet. She offers him a small smile and he gives her a single nod in return.

When he steps away, Adelaide reaches over to push a small button on the tablet that Houdini had taken out from under his arm where he had temporarily put it to help her get dressed and a little red light on a barely noticeable bump flicks on inside the helmet. A second later, Houdini is staring down at a surprisingly crystal-clear picture of the top of his head as he peers down at the device. He looks up at her and she smiles again.

“There’s the camera,” she says, stating the obvious for lack of anything else to say, and although they see her mouth moving, her voice comes out of a tiny speaker in the corner of the tablet. “You’ll be able to hear me but unfortunately you won’t be able to talk to me.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a thing,” she says, and then clarifies once she finds the right word: “An attachment. It’s supposed to go in my ear so I can hear you. I suppose George didn’t think it was a necessary part to him playing dress-up.” Adelaide stands there for a moment, clears her throat. “I guess I’ll head down, then.”

“Be careful,” Doyle says, touches her on the arm and she takes his fingers in her gloved hand, holds on to them for a few seconds before letting go and walking out to the platform and Houdini and Doyle watch her descend, closing the door behind her.

 

....

 

There’s the ladder as she climbs down, her feet as she watches her step as she lands on the platform. A closed door.

“Alright,” she says. “Here we are.” She tries to open the door but it doesn’t budge. “Damn,” she mutters, tries again and then sighs heavily, her breath temporarily fogging up the inside of the helmet. “Oh for—” She waits until it clears, walks closer to the door and puts her hands against the flat surface. “Come on you stupid thing.” She smacks the panel beside the door and then pushes the button again and this time, it starts to open but stops halfway. Adelaide curls her fingers around the edge and pushes, leaning into it until it opens far enough that she’ll be able to squeeze through and a cone of dim light spills into the immensely sized room ahead, shining on the empty metal floor that had replaced the art-deco tiles that had been blown apart when the ship was assaulted.

“Huh,” Adelaide grunts, steps cautiously into the room, checking to make sure that the seal would hold her and then turns, sliding the door shut, testing it to make sure she’d be able to get back out and then closes it again, pitch black slamming down around her. “There’s still gravity. That’s good. Now… Here we go,” she says, turns a small but fairly powerful flashlight on somewhere on the outside of her helmet and looks around the floor, starts wandering clumsily around, making a noise of frustration when the light goes out. She hits herself on the side of the head, the camera shaking but the light doesn’t come back on. “Stupid, stupid George,” they can hear her mumble to herself. “Hang on.” For about thirty seconds, the only things Houdini and Doyle hear is her breathing, muttering something about the gloves being useless and then the light is back. “There.” She does a sweep around the room, walks a circle but it’s all stacked chairs and tables pushed to the sides, an empty stage at the far end. “There’s nothing here,” she says dejectedly, standing in the center of the room. “Maybe Houdini was right. Maybe it did lie to—” She cuts herself off when something drips on to the outside of her helmet and they watch as black sludge goes rolling down like rain on a windshield.

There’s another, and then another and Adelaide very slowly bends her neck up towards the ceiling, the only place she hadn’t thought to look.

Houdini feels his heart stop, his ears rushing with blood with what he sees, feels Doyle suck in a gulp of air and not let it back out.

Adelaide gasps, utterly horrified.

The ceiling and very top of the walls are stacked with bodies, limbs contorted in distressing positions, overlapping to the point that it was difficult to tell which arm, which leg, belonged to which person, as if whatever put them up there was trying to make as many of them fit in one area as possible. Their eyes are open but unmoving and glassy.

“Oh no,” Adelaide is saying, “Oh no, no, no,” she repeats the word, scrambles to go back towards the platform but manages to slip, falls forward, slides into the puddle of sludge that had started raining down on her, like it had wanted her to find it. She rolls onto her back, wipes her helmet off with a glove, camera getting a clean view of the horror up above. How were they cemented up there? Did any of them really want to know? “I’m sorry,” she says to the people, to their bodies despite the fact that they couldn’t hear her.

Adelaide turns over, starts to crawl and then scrambles to her feet, boots slipping on the floor as she runs back the way she had come. She opens the door, lands hard on the metal platform, and then spins around, crashing her hand into the panel, the door slamming shut. She drops down, sits with her back pressed against it, her knees pulled up to her chest. Houdini goes to march to the door on their floor, ready to go get her but Doyle grabs his arm, holds him back, his head shaking. _Give her a minute_ , his eyes say.

After about two of them, Adelaide exhales shakily and then stands up, approaching the ladder and climbing wordlessly back up to them.

“Get this thing off me,” she demands once she’s in the hallway again and they hastily comply, Doyle handling the removal of her helmet and his hands slip twice, unable to get a proper grip but he finally gets it, drops it to the floor and Houdini unseals the rest of the suit, Adelaide pushing the top half off before sitting on the floor, unlatching the cumbersome boots herself, tugging them free and then kicking the rest of the suit off into a pile at her feet. She puts her head in her hands, catches her breath and then stands, her hands flexing nervously as she paces. 

“Are you okay?” Houdini asks and Adelaide laughs but there’s no mirth to it.

“Am I _okay_? Am I—? You only had to look at it from your little screen. I was—” She says as if they’d already forgotten. “Those people…” She says, puts her hands to her face.

“Were they—?” Houdini tries to ask. He feels sick to his stomach. “I mean, are they really—?” _Are they really alive?_  

“They are,” Adelaide says weakly. “When I… When I fell… I could see them breathing. Even that far away, I could see them breathing.”

“We have to break the seal,” Houdini says abruptly, shocks even himself as he says it and Adelaide’s head whips around to stare at him, her expression doused with fire.

“What?” She storms over to him, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “You want to space hundreds of people?”

“Are they even people anymore?” Houdini asks her. “You saw them. We all saw them. They’re— They’re obviously suffering. That sludge… it’s everywhere in there. Cold sends it into self-preservation mode, gives it a chance to fight. I mean, who knows what it might do to try and save itself. The only way to get rid of it is to—”

“Kill it,” Adelaide finishes for him. “I know. You’re telling me that you’ll refuse to kill Doyle if it comes to that but you can murder all those people?”

“They’re basically dead already,” Houdini says. “We all saw them. We’d be doing them a favor. And we’d be getting rid of a heck of a lot of that sludge while we’re at it.”

“As much as it pains me to admit,” Doyle says and he’s starting to sound drunker, his words muddying together even worse than earlier, “Houdini might be right about this. If there was any way to save them… to bring them back…” He can’t finish a sentence but Houdini understands the gist and he knows that Adelaide does, too. If there was a way to pull them free from the ceiling, to put their limbs back in the right place, to pump the sludge from their insides… If there was. But there wasn’t. They didn’t have another solution and Houdini didn’t know how much longer he wanted to make those hundred-or-so of people wait for one that might never come.

“I can’t believe— We’re not,” Adelaide says, looking back and forth between them. “I won’t allow you to do it.”

“Adelaide,” Doyle says, taking a few steps toward her, “It might be for the b— Oh.” His legs give out on him mid-sentence, starts falling to the floor and both Houdini and Adelaide reach out to catch him, each grasping onto an elbow, trying to hold him up.

“Doyle,” Houdini says, “Hey. You okay?”

“I don’t—” He coughs and sludge spatters on his lips. He tilts his head down and spits out a gob of it on the floor. It starts seeping out of his nose and his eyes again and he starts to fall further towards the ground, Houdini and Adelaide moving with him.

“TOLD. YOU.” Says an impassive voice from behind them and they look to see the mangled AI standing a bit of a ways down the hall, on the opposite side of where the ladder was, as if it had simply materialized there out of thin air. “NOT. DEAD.”

“That’s what you call ‘not dead’?” Houdini asks furiously.

“NOT DEAD. BREATHING. DON’T KILL US.” The last part is so out of place that it throws Houdini off for a few seconds. _Alive. It means ‘alive’. It doesn’t know the word._

“What are you doing to them?” Adelaide asks.

“UNDERSTAND.”

“You’re learning,” Doyle says but the words are barely coherent.

“YES,” the AI says after a moment.

" _That’s_ how you learn?” Houdini asks, his voice rising. “By stacking bodies and stuffing yourself inside of them?”

“YES,” it says and then: “MONSTER.”

“No,” Houdini says, standing up, gesturing at it with a finger. “ _You_. Not us.”

“You have to let them go,” Adelaide pleads and it clicks at them, thinking.

“If you don’t,” Houdini says, “I’m going to break that seal down there and send your friends into space.” He wanted to do it anyway but he didn’t know If the sludge knew that or not. He didn’t care. It turned those people into that monstrosity below them, they had to be able to reverse it and any sort of threat he could throw at it was worth a shot. It was still learning and stupid things could always be fooled, even if it’s just for a little while. “How many of you are in there? How does it work exactly? Is it just one of you or are there thousands? Millions?” No answer. “You don’t like the cold.” The AI clicks rapidlyat him when Houdini says that. “Yeah. You must have come here in a ship, right? Space is fucking freezing. How long do you think you’d last floating around out there?”

“KILL?” The AI asks.

“Yeah,” Houdini says. “Kill.”

“Why?” The question comes, not from the AI but from behind Houdini, the voice clear and detached but painfully familiar and he turns to look down at Doyle. He still had Adelaide’s arm around his shoulder but she lets him go when he speaks, stumbles to her feet and quickly moves away to stand beside Houdini. Sludge-Doyle stands, the movements sloppy and awkward, only a slight improvement over the second time it had tried when he and Houdini were locked in the cold hotel room.

“You attacked us,” Adelaide says. Houdini’s stomach has risen into his throat and he tries to swallow it back down but it’s not going anywhere. “You took our memories. You— You did those horrible things to everyone on board. You’re hurting our friend.”

“We saw a beast floating in space,” Sludge-Doyle says. “We thought... Predator. Tried to kill it but inside were more lifeforms. We were confused. We had to understand.”

“But why did you leave us alive?” She asks and, behind them, the AI clicks as if it wants to correct her. Everyone is alive. But it says nothing.

“We wanted to watch. Joining is only one way we learn. Observation another. You were chosen at random. One of each gender. This body to observe. Memories of arrival erased. You were not supposed to know we were here. In here.” Sludge-Doyle gestures limply at it’s body. “Your brains are… difficult. Fought back. Pushed. Wanted to look at us under machines.” The disappearing from the bottle. The distraction when they took another sample. “Tried to use cold.” _When it attacked me_ , Houdini thinks. _Self-preservation_. “Do not kill us.”

“Why not?” Houdini hears himself ask. Sludge-Doyle hesitates, face stony, eyes narrowing as if it didn’t understand the question.

“We just want to learn.” It almost sounds confused.

“There are better ways,” Adelaide says. “You can just talk. Have a conversation.”

“We tried. You did not understand.” The screaming static, the clicking. “Your language. How else would we learn to speak it so quickly? Our way. We’re talking.”

“It’s not right,” Adelaide says. “It’s cruel.”

“You would kill your own kind to kill another?”

“We won’t be killing our own kind,” Houdini says, his voice cracking with anger, “You already did that for us. We’d just be putting them out of their misery.”

“We just want to learn,” Sludge-Doyle repeats and it seems more ominous this time, almost insistent, as if it’s trying to tell them something it can’t quite figure out how to put into the words it already knows. Houdini let’s the sentence run through his head, over and over, and he touches on something but it disappears. “Do you still want to kill us?" 

“Yes,” Houdini says, waits for Adelaide to contradict him, to protest, but she remains silent.

“Unfortunate,” Sludge-Doyle says and Houdini barely has time to react, to ask him what that was supposed to mean, when he feels something cold touch the back of his neck and he blacks out.

 

....

 

The alarm is blaring and, for one horrible second, Houdini thinks everything’s started over again, that he was going to find himself back on floor thirty-something, surrounded by debris. He rubs at his eyes, lifts himself on his elbows and finds that he’s on the ground in the hallway he had been in only moments earlier, except now both Doyle and the AI had disappeared. He looks to his left and Adelaide is still passed out next to him and he moves over onto his knees, clutches onto her arm, shaking her, says her name until he sees her eyes flutter open.

“What— What happened? What’s that—” She rolls on to her back and then sits up, looking wildly around. “Where’s—?”

“I don’t know,” Houdini says, standing up and then helping Adelaide to her feet.

“The alarm…” Adelaide says, starts to say something else but they stumble when the ship lurches. “Oh no.”

“It said it wants to learn,” Houdini says. “It—”

“It knows about Earth,” Adelaide says weakly, eyes wide. “It’s trying to fly the ship.” They both start to run towards the ladder and they leap onto it, starting to climb up as fast as they can. Houdini loses his grip when the ship lurches again, feels himself starting to fall but he manages to hook his arm around a rung, uses his bad wrist without thinking and cries out. Adelaide stops, worriedly calls out his name.

“I’m okay,” Houdini says, regains his footing and starts climbing once again, his wrist now throbbing. It takes an agonizingly long time to reach the top floor and the door slides open for them easily, unbroken and not barricaded, as if the alien sludge was unconcerned about Houdini and Adelaide’s potential arrival, it’s knocking them out just to buy itself some time to bring the ship back to life.

Sludge-Doyle is standing behind the large desk in the Captain’s room, fingers dancing over the displays, the contorted and damaged AI standing like a sentry by the shattered glass door. It starts to click loudly when it sees them and Houdini rushes it, pushes it down just like he had done before and almost laughs at how ineffective it had turned out to be as a guard dog. He starts to make his way towards the body behind the desk when he feels a hand grab around his ankle and pull, yanking him off his feet and he hits the ground, tries to turn his body so he doesn’t land on his face and manages to land on his shoulder instead, gritting his teeth against the surge of pain that explodes from it when he rolls over onto his stomach and tries to use his arm to help him get away from his captor.

Adelaide runs past him, leaves him to deal with the AI on his own and he doesn’t blame her, watches as she grabs one of the chairs she had beat the AI with earlier but, instead, she charges at Sludge-Doyle, goes to swing but it reacts faster than she expected, drops to the floor to move out of it’s path and then stands sloppily again, wrenches the chair from Adelaide’s hands and throws it back at her with surprising strength. She just barely manages to move in time, the furniture colliding with the wall behind her, knocking a pieces of it off, heavy wires popping free from their casing, flopping wildly, bright sparks discharging from the ends that were no longer connected to anything.

“No,” Sludge-Doyle says. “You will not stop us.” Houdini turns his attention to the AI that still had a tight grip on him and tries to kick at it to no avail, twists his body so he could grasp the arm that was holding him and he starts to pull, pushing the bottom of his foot against the top of the AI’s head. His wrist and shoulder are screaming at him but he doesn’t stop until he hears the crack of the AI’s arm breaking off the rest of the torso and he falls back, hits his head on the floor but sits back up, uncurling the metal fingers from his ankle. He turns just in time to see Sludge-Doyle approaching Adelaide and punching her in the stomach, shuffling back to his station to continue working as she bends, doubled-over, looks for a moment like she’s going to be throw up.

Houdini stands and, for lack of a better option, flings the dead arm in Sludge-Doyle’s direction, watches as it slams into Doyle’s head and its neck snaps back. It stumbles but catches itself, looks up from the display in front of it, stares at Houdini and starts to climb over the desk to get to him when Adelaide suddenly lunges forward and jumps on its back, arms wrapped around its neck, legs around its waist. It fights to get her off but she’s holding on too tightly and Houdini takes this chance to run forward, delivering a swift blow to the face’s jaw, strikes again and the body staggers backwards.

“We will learn,” Sludge-Doyle says, sludge leaking from its mouth instead of blood. It grabs Adelaide’s hand, brings it to Doyle’s mouth and bites down hard. Adelaide yelps, leaps off his back, holds her injured hand, blood seeping through the fingers as she covers the wound and Houdini tries to punch again but Sludge-Doyle hits him first, grabs at Houdini’s already wounded wrist and Houdini yells, grinds his teeth together in pain. “We tried to be agreeable. Observe. Learn. You didn’t have to know. But your lifeforms feel. You are unique. There are more. Many more. We want to learn. Let us learn.”

“No,” Adelaide says from behind it and Sludge-Doyle lets go of Houdini, turns around just in time for her to jam the two sparking wires against Doyle’s chest. His whole body goes rigid, his back arched, mouth and eyes wide open, and then she finally takes them away, watches as he falls to the floor with a sickening thud. Houdini throws himself down beside him, leans down, touches his neck and looks slowly at Adelaide, stunned, her face flushed and her eyes wet.

“He’s dead,” Houdini says. Doyle’s body suddenly starts to seize and roll, ends up on it’s side and they watch as black sludge vomits from Doyle’s gaping mouth, puddling on the floor near his head. The sludge bubbles, a skin forming on the surface as it slowly begins to dry out. The body was dead and the sludge had died with it. _The body was dead_ , Houdini realizes with horror. Adelaide seems to come to the same realization right when he does and they look frantically around the room until Adelaide’s eyes settle on the bag she had stuffed full of medical supplies all those hours ago, still left unattended on the floor from when she had accidentally left it behind. She dives for it, turns the bag over, emptying the contents, boxes and bottles pouring out, a heavy black box finally hitting the floor and she grabs at it, crawls over to them, starts to pull it apart, revealing two paddles attached to the instrument by wires. She pushes a button with her bloody hand and the machine begins to whine.

“Move!” Adelaide shouts and Houdini acquiesces to her command without question. She leans over Doyle’s body, shoves the paddles against his chest and his body thumps up, hits the floor. She pulls them back and Houdini angles forward, listens, glances at Adelaide and shakes his head. Adelaide does it again and Houdini listens once more, shakes his head a second time. “Come on, Doyle,” Adelaide says, pushes them against his chest for a third time and Doyle suddenly gasps back into his body, life splashing back into his open eyes, his limbs flailing. He breathes heavily, his body trembling and Adelaide drops the defibrillator, putting her face in her clean hand and Houdini lowers his head onto Doyle’s shoulder, his hands on his arm. “The ship,” Adelaide says abruptly after a moment, clambers to her feet and over to the displays.

She moves her hand across a screen to the right and the ship lurches to a stop. Houdini helps Doyle sit up and he groans in pain, pulls his shirt back from his chest to look at two red, angry burns on his skin. 

“What… What happened?” Doyle asks, his voice hoarse and shaky.

“You died is what happened,” Houdini says.

“What?” Doyle asks and Houdini points to the inert puddle of sludge on the floor next to him. Doyle looks startled and then moves away from it just a few inches as if he thought it might start sliding along towards him to try and slip back inside. “I was right,” he says. He pauses, blinks as if finally catching on to something and looks appalled at Houdini. “I died.”

“Yeah,” Houdini says, patting him on the back. “You did.”

“I stopped the ship,” Adelaide says, “But it doesn’t solve the problem of the sludge still being on board.”

“Can you open the seal on the fifteenth floor from there?” Houdini asks.

“Yes,” Adelaide says, motions her fingers over the display in front of her, her hand hovering just above it as she peers over at Houdini and then at Doyle, who seemed to still be attempting to process the fact that he hadn’t been alive for a short while.

“Do it,” Houdini says and she slaps her palm against the screen without giving it a second look. A warning noise blares once, twice, over the speakers and then a computerized voice says:

“ _Seal open_.”

And then there’s silence.

Out of the window behind Adelaide the stars that had once looked normal but just very slightly off suddenly become blurry and smudged, begin to fade and disappear. They watch as a behemoth—a clunky, misshapen design that looked more like a floating piece of obsidian than a spaceship—shimmers into view, casting a giant shadow over them as it fills up nearly the entire glass with its massive size.

“Holy shit,” Houdini says. A screaming static accompanied by frenzied, unpredictable clicks seems to roar through the entire solar system and they cover their ears as the noise shakes the ship around them. It lasts for five minutes—it sounds like an almost mournful, furious cry—and then, just like that, it stops and the ship starts to fly away, lifting up over the _Ark Royal_. Houdini helps Doyle to his feet, allows him to use him as a support, his legs unsteady, and the three of them hurry closer towards the window, watching as the behemoth spins, rotating like an asteroid, and then it barrels forward, rolling through space, disappearing into the distance, camouflaged against the pitch black and star splattered sky.

They turn simultaneously when the display behind them starts beeping—the telltale sign of an incoming message—and they walk quickly over to the desk, Adelaide bringing up a different screen to reveal a single flashing icon and she swipes it open, doesn’t seem to recognize the string of numbers that crawled across the bottom but she hits ‘play’ anyway and they listen as an unfamiliar, crystal clear voice starts streaming out at them.

“This is Captain Bradshaw of the cargo ship _Pelican_. We were making a return to Earth from Mars when we got a message from the _Ark Royal_ asking for immediate assistance from anybody who might catch the signal and it looks like we’re it. We’ve tried to contact you a few times but there’s been too much interference. It’s a miracle your message even got through to us at all. You’re some lucky sons-of-bitches. Hopefully you’ll get this one. We’re about a day away from your location. Just hang in there, _Ark Royal_ , we’re on our way.”


	2. Epilogue.

It’s been six weeks since Houdini has been back on Earth, and five of those were spent hidden away in some nameless, indistinct building where all the walls were white or made of glass, separated from his friends and poked and prodded night and day by scientists, badgered with thousands of questions by men and women in black suits with badges he didn’t recognize. At least they did him the favor of slapping a cast on what turned out to be a fractured wrist.

They wanted to know everything about the sludge, the exact words it had used, what it looked like, how it moved, how it tasted. Houdini questioned why they were wasting their time asking things that they could easily find out on their own but they had just stared at him confused.

“The ship,” he had said. “We blew some of it out into space but it’s still in the pipes. It’s still there.” They had shaken their heads, frowned.

“We took that ship apart,” a scientist had told him. “It’s empty. All we could find was this.” They showed him a picture of a pill bottle, a teaspoon of the sludge still resting in the bottom. It hadn’t tried to escape like it did the first time, Houdini notices, a sinking feeling weighing down in his chest. It’s almost as if it was waiting, quietly biding its time, hoping that someone would find it.

 _We want to learn_.

 

....

 

He had asked about Doyle and Adelaide repeatedly while he was there, knew that they had to still be in the building, going through the same thing as him, but the scientists and agents simply kept telling him that they were being “taken care of”, wouldn’t let them see each other, wouldn’t even say when they were going home. Eventually he stopped asking, which he figured is what they wanted in the first place.

 

.  .  .  .

 

“This would be much easier to spin if you hadn’t spaced all those people,” a woman with dirty blonde hair had said as she sat across Houdini at a metal table in a blank room on the day before he was to finally be released. She crossed the leg of her tailored pantsuit and she adjusted her glasses, flipped through pages on a tablet she had on the table’s surface. “We had to send a collection team out to get them all. There might still be a few floating around out there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry we made your lives so difficult,” Houdini apologized sarcastically. She ignored it.

“If anyone asks you what happened,” she says, “It was an accident. Mechanical failure. There was a fire. An explosion. You, Mister Conan Doyle and Miss Stratton—”

“ _Officer_ Stratton.” Houdini had corrected her and she raised an eyebrow but didn’t fix her mistake, continuing as if the interruption had merely been a fly buzzing past her head.

“—Were lucky to have survived.”

“Lucky?” Houdini had laughed. “You really think people are going to believe the three of us were the only survivors out of two-hundred-fifty people because we were _lucky_?”

“People, Mister Houdini,” she said, “Are willing to believe a remarkable amount of impossible things.” She made him sign reams of actual paper, all saying that if he breathed a word of what truly happened on board the _Ark Royal_ he would be, best case, arrested. He’d asked what the worst case was but she hadn’t responded.

As soon as he left he went to his mother and she sobbed, held his face and begged him to tell her what happened. He could feel it itching in the back of his throat, boiling over him like a steaming kettle of water but, in the end, he told her that he didn’t want to talk about it and she had understood.

He left town, got the biggest, most lavish hotel room he could find in the noisiest nearby city and holed up, just him and his mother. She took care of him, cooked, tried to make him leave, to at least go for a walk but he refused.

“You were trapped up there for three days,” she told him. He hadn’t known that until they were brought back to solid ground. It had all felt like one continuous day, hours moving like molasses. It’s difficult to tell time, he figures, when it’s always dark outside. “Why are you squirrelling yourself away in here?” He wasn’t sure. It didn’t make much sense to him either. He said it was because he didn’t want people to see him, didn’t want them to try and talk to him, to start asking questions and she accepted that as a decent enough answer.

The press had tried calling him, hounding him for interviews and, in any other circumstance, he would be on television every night if he could manage it but this time he declined, said he needed to “spend time with his family”, that he “needed more time to recover”. He just needed more time. The truth was that he couldn’t sit in front of millions of people, in front of his fans, and lie to them. (“But you do that every time you perform,” he can hear a tiresome voice in the back of his head saying to him. “You trick your audience. You lie. What’s a few more?” That’s different. Somehow, that was different.)

 

.  .  .  .

 

It’s noon on Sunday, his first week of freedom almost over and he’s still in bed, drifting in that gentle pool of being awake but still mostly asleep when his mother enters the room and nudges him until he responds.

“What?” He mumbles it into the pillow, feels like a kid again being woken up too early for school.

“There’s someone on the phone for you,” she says and he rolls over, sees her standing over him, the phone clutched in her hands, palm pressed over the receiver.

“I told you,” he says, “No interviews. No books. I’m not talking to anyone. And if it’s my manager, tell him next month. It’ll be a big comeback. People will love it.” He flops back down, turns away from her but she clears her throat. He knows she’s only putting up with his behavior because of what happened to him and, at first, he milked it but now it was starting to hit the point where he was feeling guilty. It still didn’t stop him from pulling the covers over his head, trying to hide from her and the phone.

“It’s someone from the government. Says her name is Agent Holst?” Holst. He scrounges around in his head, tries to pull the name out from somewhere, anywhere and then it hits him: _Dirty blonde hair. Tailored pantsuit. “People are willing to believe a remarkable amount of impossible things.”_

He throws the covers off, sits up, swings his legs over the side of the mattress and holds out his hand, feels the weight of the phone, cautiously putting it to his ear. (He hates it, hates how he springs into action at the call of someone Important and Official. They trained him well during those five weeks, and he hadn’t even noticed.)

“Agent Holst. Miss me already?” He teases her, because that’s how he copes. He thinks he can hear her sigh.

“Mister Houdini,” she says, her tone crisp and completely business, “There’s a car waiting for you out front. We need you to come in ASAP.” He can feel her start pull the phone away from her face, already finished with their extraordinarily brief conversation, but he tells her to wait and, surprisingly, she obeys.

“You know where I am?” He stands, looks out his window and down towards the street. There is, indeed, a suspiciously shiny black car idling by the front doors of the hotel.

“Of course we do.” Agent Holst says it as if she couldn’t believe how naive he was and then hangs up on him.

 

.  .  .  .

 

It’s the same building that he had been secreted away in when he first came back but, this time, a young man with thick glasses and a suit slightly too big for him escorts him onto an elevator and instead of going down towards the lower levels, they start to go up. The kid leads him through a maze of hallways until they arrive at a glass-enclosed conference room where someone all-too-familiar is already waiting, his back turned to the door.

His escort wanders off and Houdini opens the door to the room, waits for it so silently slide shut before saying:

“Doyle.”

Doyle turns abruptly, startled, broken out of whatever reverie he was lost in but the surprise shifts quickly into relief when he sees who it is.

“Harry. It’s good to—” Doyle starts but Houdini cuts him off, rushes forward and pulls his arms around him and Doyle tenses for a brief moment before leaning into the hug, wrapping his arms around Houdini’s shoulders. He slaps Doyle on the back of his shoulder when they disconnect from one another and Houdini gives him a quick once-over.

“When’d they let you out?” He asks. “I figured they’d want to keep you in there forever since… you know.”

“Yes. Well,” Doyle says, looks away from Houdini out towards the view of skyscrapers that surrounded them as if he’s remembering something he doesn’t want to but then turns back to Houdini and forces a tight smile. “They wanted to but I made them change their minds.”

“You pulled the Kid Card, huh?” Houdini says and Doyle actually laughs.

“Something like that, yes.” They lapse into a companionable—if somewhat awkward—silence, the only sound their breathing and the low hum of the lights hanging from the ceiling.

“How, uh… How’re you doing, though?” Houdini asks. “I mean really.”

“I’m managing,” Doyle says softly.

“Yeah,” Houdini agrees. “‘Managing’ about covers it.” There are a lot of things he wants to ask Doyle: Does he get nightmares? Does he sometimes drift off and remember things the aliens promised that would always remain forgotten? Did he get twitchy around Security AIs? There are a lot, but he doesn’t get to ask any of them because the door is opening again and they watch as Adelaide walks in, hesitating, her eyes widening slightly.

“Harry,” she says. “Doyle.” She approaches them, hugs them both, touches them as if she was afraid they might break. They stand in a circle and she looks back and forth between them, the corners of her mouth turned up just a bit. “It’s good to see you both.”

“How’ve you been?” Houdini asks and she shrugs, glances at the floor, frowning fleetingly before staring at them both again.

“Managing.” Doyle seems to notice for the first time Houdini’s wrist in it’s cast and Adelaide’s tightly bandaged hand and he looks at them regretfully. “I’m sorry about—” He swallows.

“It wasn’t you,” Adelaide reassures him. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I feel as if we're the ones who should be apologizing to you.”

"Hey," Houdini protests, "You're the one who killed him, not me." Adelaide glares at him but there's no true malice behind it. Doyle opens his mouth to respond but he’s interrupted by a familiar voice from the doorway saying: “Good. You’re all here.”

They spin around to see Agent Holst watching them and she walks into the room, her shoes muffled by the soft carpet. She drops a stack of paper-thin tablets on to the table and then presses her palms down on the surface, leaning towards them and pausing as if they were the ones who had called _her_ there and she wanted to know what they had to say. “Have any of you heard of a ship called the _SV Ragazzino_?” The three of them all share a look before glancing back at her, shaking their heads. “Good,” she repeats. “You’re not supposed to have.” She directs their attention to a television hung on the far wall that they hadn’t noticed before and a still image of a large but sleek science vessel is displayed on the screen. “It’s been perfectly fine and on course for two weeks now,” she says.

“To where?” Doyle asks but Agent Holst just ignores him.

“Three days ago we received a message from the Captain. It was mostly garbled. We only managed to grab bits and pieces from it.” She pulls a small device from her jacket pocket and slides it onto the table, finger hovering over a button. “You never heard this, got it?” She waits for them to nod before pressing ‘play’.

 _“Burst right through the_ — _Don’t know where it came_ — _Can’t stop it_ — _It’s trying to_ — _Holy shit, Seven-Two-Eight! Seven-Two-Eight!”_

Agent Holst stares at them when it finishes but none of them say anything right away.

“Seven-two-eight,” Adelaide says slowly, her voice quiet. “Those were the first three numbers from where that message from the alien originated from.”

“Correct,” Agent Holst says, her expression unreadable.

“You’re trying to find it,” Doyle says, his voice quivering with barely contained anger and Houdini doesn’t blame him.

“Correct again,” Agent Holst says. “Although we’re not ‘trying’ to find it, as you said. We _did_ find it. The numbers led us to a clear location. It might not be where it’s from originally, per say, but it’s a start.”

“You’re playing with fire,” Houdini tells her, surprised by how cold his voice was but Agent Holst shrugs.

“Maybe. But the existence of this… this creature is unprecedented. There’s real, intelligent life out there.” She exhales and slouches her shoulders. “Look, the fact of the matter is that all we had to go on is what you told us over those five weeks. That’s all we know.” There’s an insistent edge to her voice when she says that, as if she’s trying her best to convince them that what she just said was the truth. “Something very bad happened out there and nobody down here knows how to deal with it. We want to send you guys out there.”

“Us?” Houdini scoffs. “You _do_ know we’re not your egghead scientists, right? We’re not even military. I mean, for Christ’s sake, look at us.” He’s referring to his cast, to Adelaide’s hand, to the fancy, nextgen OmniTech Boot on Doyle’s leg and the burns he knows are still on his chest. Agent Holst nods her head once slightly, conceding to his point.

“True,” Agent Holst says. “But you’re the closest things we have to experts right now. You’ll mostly just be assessing the situation. We’re not asking you to go do any heavy-lifting. That’s for the other guys.” Houdini wants to ask what ‘other guys’ she means but he already knows she won’t give him an answer so, instead, he says:

“What if we say ‘no’?” Houdini asks and Agent Holst blinks at him.

“You can’t.”

“I’m sorry?” Doyle asks with a slight chuckle of disbelief.

“All that paper you signed before we released you last week? One of those was a contract. Said that if we needed your help, we’d call and you’d come running. You basically work for us.” Houdini feels his face flush with anger, but he thinks he might be more angry at himself than anybody else. Normally he was good about reading every bit of something he had to sign, but he was so tired and desperate just to go home, that by the time he had gotten to the last few pages of what Agent Holst had given him to scrawl his signature on, he had just written his name on the solid line just to get it over with. By the looks on Doyle and Adelaide’s faces, he could tell they had done the exact same thing.

Houdini wouldn’t be surprised if these people had set it up that way on purpose.

“There’s a shuttle waiting for you in our hangar and we’ve already packed you a few bags,” Agent Holst says, picking up the tablets that never came into play and walking towards the door where the kid who had escorted Houdini to the conference room was standing in the open doorway. “Agent Kirby will fill you in on the rest.”

“Wait,” Adelaide says and Agent Holst stops, turns back around. “A shuttle? When are you expecting us to leave?” Agent Holst pushes up the sleeve on her right arm and glances at her watch.

“Twenty minutes,” she says, waves, and then walks off down the hall without another word.

“Fill us in?” Adelaide asks Houdini and Doyle and then turns to face Agent Kirby. “Fill us in on what?”

“I’m supposed to fill you in on the basic mission details,” Agent Kirby says, stepping towards them conspiratorially, “But I have to tell you something. Something that Agent Holst didn’t want you to know. Something about what’s going on with the Seven-Two-Eight on the _Ragazzino_.” He looks nervously behind him at the other officers, the other suited agents wandering past and then stares at them again. “I don’t think it’s fair to hide it from you.”

“What?” Houdini asks. “Spit it out.”

“There was another message we got from the ship. It’s the Captain’s voice but it sounds weird. Not like him. Most of it didn’t make sense but then at the end…” He pauses, swallows, lowers his voice. “It asked for you,” He says, looks up at Doyle and both Houdini and Adelaide turn to him as well, watch the color drain from his face. “It said it was time for you to come home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Normally this is the point where I would write out a hundred-something word author's note, trying to be funny and explaining some of the decisions I made or just offering little bits of trivia I thought you'd find interesting (you probably wouldn't). I even actually wrote the whole damn thing out but, in the end, I decided not to post it.
> 
> Instead, I'm just going to thank you for reading and leave you with some music. There were a lot of other people's 8tracks mixes in my life while I wrote this, but I also listened to these three songs a lot and I feel like they give you a pretty good idea of what kind of atmosphere I was going during the whole story. Also I just love sharing music with people. 
> 
> [Here](https://soundcloud.com/tri_angle_records/rabit-pandemic) [you](https://soundcloud.com/denovali/petrels-we-are-falling-into-the-heart-of-the-sun) [go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve4i4iy-ag).
> 
> I'm on tumblr! [@kenlubin](http://kenlubin.tumblr.com), if you want to chat.


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